I think I interpreted the article differently than you did. My interpretation is that BestBuy maintained a 'look-a-like' website on their intranet, which was the same as the public one, minus some special offers and discounts.
<br><br>But even if it is like you describe, a feature that lets employees check on the advertised price, isn't it important to get that right? Wouldn't you make sure you included discounts and sales when you're designing this functionality? Wouldn't you test these types of cases when you're rolling the system out? Didn't somebody notice before this got to the AG? Its a lot to swallow.
<br><br>I generally say "Don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence." But BestBuy doesn't have a clean record here. I'm not going to google this to confirm it, but didn't they have a thing where they kicked shoppers out of the store for writing down prices? Didn't they settle with the AG of NJ (for a small amount) over rebate fraud?
<br><br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 3/7/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Tim Lesher</b> <<a href="mailto:tlesher@gmail.com">tlesher@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
1. BestBuy has an intranet that's accessible from its store terminals.<br>2. They add a feature to the intranet that lets employees check the<br>prices a customer sees on the public web site.<br>3. That feature has a synchronization bug which causes the prices not
<br>to match in cases of (for example) limited-time or limited-area sales.<br><br>Of course, this should potentially cause errors in both directions,<br>but no customer is ever going to file a lawsuit about getting charged
<br>too little, are they? They'll just go home and snicker about how they<br>"beat the man".<br></blockquote></div><br>