Dear CP BB

Dear Central Park Best Buy:

I want to thank you for the lack of service your team has provided to me over the course of the past year. If I'm not mistaken, to date your team's service procedures have probably cost you somewhere in the realm of $500.

Take this weekend, for instance. Sunday, we got the Best Buy circular in the mail and saw that you were having a nice monitor on sale for $129.00. We thought we'd go buy it, since my husband's monitor has been on the blink for some time now. We arrived an hour after the store opened, found the monitor on display with the advertised price, and waited while the Blue Shirt Cronies of Best Buy assisted a whole pile of other customers. Finally, one guy pawned us off on another guy, who checked his computer, announced that the monitor in question was out of stock, probably due to the fact that it was being discontinued, and that we could possibly get one at the Stafford store or if not, they'd have them in Springfield.

Um, what?

Do you mean to tell me that you are advertising products that aren't even being made, that your stores have no intention of selling? And what's more, you're displaying them on shelves?

To make matters worse, this is the second time in 6 months that we've gone into this particular store to buy a monitor on the day it appeared in the paper, only to be told that the monitor in question was out of stock.

Really? Why do you keep advertising them? Why are you advertising products you have no intention of stocking or selling?

Additionally, I was totally dismissed a mere two months ago when I attempted to find out about the purchase of satellite radio for my husband's Christmas present. The child working the car electronics section of the store literally gave me 30 seconds of his time to basically tell me no information whatsoever about the programming, much less the equipment, and then turned to work with another customer, who I suppose looks more likely to purchase something than I did.

In the past month, I've also been sent on a wild goose chase around the store to find an external card reader for my camera's memory card. No one knew where they were in three different sections of the store, including at the returns/exchange desk where I had turned in the internal card reader to swap for the external.

Let's not even get started on the dude you sent to my house to hook up my new TV a couple of years ago who ripped out a few wires, told me my TV was fixed and disappeared. And it took you another week to get anyone out to fix what he had undone and the first words out of their mouths when they got behind the TV to set it up were, "What the hell did Jesse do here?!" They were the only Best Buy employees I've actually felt didn't treat me like a dumb ass simply because I'm a woman, and apparently not a wealthy-looking one at that.

Well, screw you and your stupid monitors. I came home and bought the exact same monitor on Amazon.com for an amazing $97.00. It came with free shipping and was delivered direct to my front door. And I didn't have to deal with any annoying sales pitch about warranties or any of that crap either. Too bad Circuit City is going out of business. I'll always have Amazon.

Adios from an iPod listenin', plasma TV watchin', computer usin', digital picture takin', cell phone callin', Wii playin' disgruntled customer,
S. C. Kosior