What was the worst customer service experience you have ever had?

Last night, at Best Buy.

I'm normally very frugal but I had recently come into 4K of extra money and decided to treat myself and my daughter and buy a new flat panel TV. Before I left for Best Buy, I made myself a drink to loosen up a bit to make it easier to let guy of my money.

When I arrived at Best Buy, I notice that the store is fairly empty. There were two couples, a guy and my daughter and I. I see that there are two employees in the TV department playing with a sound bar. They left us alone which was cool because I like to get a lay of the land. I finally landed on a 60" flat screen for $800. We were the only ones in the TV department and I noticed that the employees that were playing with the sound bar had disappeared. I looked around the store and I could only see tumbleweed.

My daughter knows how fast I would back out of spending money so she went up front to ask for help and the employee in the front offered to send someone back to help us. Five minutes later and still nobody had come back. So I take a tour of the store to find somebody and end up up front to find three employees shooting the shit and I asked if I could get some help. One of the guys breaks away from the group to find somebody. Some time passes and he comes up empty handed and then helps us himself directly. I have no idea why he couldn't have done that in the first place.

It has now been at least 25 minutes since I decided on a purchase and I am just getting some help. I show him the model I wanted and he went to the back to pull it. He came back from the back room and said "I have a whole lot of nada." and then he proceeds to try to up sell me to another model for $900. I had been ready to walk out a long time ago so I told him that I will find something cheaper online and have it delivered to my house and cut out the middle man.

What was so infuriating about the whole thing wasn't the wait but the fact that all this money had been spent on building this brick and mortar structure in a strip mall and paying for building maintenance and setting up the retail space and all the store fixtures and demo product and stocking the warehouse and hiring employees and all the money thrown into the marketing that entices the customer into the building and yet the fucking incompetent employees drop the very ball that keeps them employed. I mean, here I am, a cheap mother fucker with a shit ton of expendable money in his pocket walking around Best Buy in desperation to FIND SOME USELESS MOTHER FUCKER TO HAND MY MONEY TO AND I CAN'T GET ANYONE TO TAKE IT. What a joke on American retail.

How is it that three employees can stand up front and shoot the shit while there are paying customers in the building that need help? There was a time when customers came first. They have no idea how much money had been put up front just to get a customer to walk into a store and talk a look and they just blow that opportunity like it was no big deal. We are doomed if this is the best we can get in the work force. If I had been met with an employee then maybe he could have sold me that $900 dollar TV but I was too disappointing in the whole place to have gone for it by the time I got any help.

/r/AskReddit Thread