I was in the office the other day and overheard a coworker mention his frustrations with the customer service at Best Buy. At first I didn't think anything of it, but later when we were working together I asked him about it to be polite and keep the conversation going.
He began by telling me how his new wife had driven an hour and a half to Best Buy to pick up something that he had ordered in his name. She hadn't changed her name yet, so the names did not match the order and they wouldn't give her whatever it was that they had purchased. That seemed pretty unfortunate, but he continued that he was "fed up" with the whole organization and he didn't want to give them his business anymore. He then launched into a previous complaint. Apparently, he had spent enough money over the year to qualify for "gold status" (or even diamond, I have no idea) and that came with a free home theater tuning session with the geek squad. But somewhere along the line, Best Buy had changed their terms so that only the next level higher of rewards customer would get the free tuning session and he no longer qualified. I sympathized with him, because while I don't agree with the spending, I do agree that it is unfair for a company to change their policy like that without informing him. I then asked how much you have to spend to get to his reward status and he said 10k in a calendar year. I almost choked. This guy doesn't even gross 100k before taxes, so he is effectively spending more than 10% of his yearly income at Best Buy. I asked him how he could possibly spend that much, and he said that he bought a home theater system for his mother, one for himself, and a ton of games and another TV. To top that off, he drives a skyline or some other quasi-sports car which only takes premium gas, orders stuff on amazon all the time, and generally does not have two nickels to rub together. He's also the first guy to complain when the yearly raise is only "1%" and how he's getting ripped off all the time. It's like a slow motion train wreck.