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The difference to the customer is zero. Unavailable for purchase either way.

Wrong. Every iPad 2 that was being held back by best Buy could've been sold to someone who ordered at Apple's site online, or at an Apple Store... or perhaps some other retailer who knows better than to artificially restrict supply when there's already a supply issue in evidence.

If this report has any truth to it, Apple should be ashamed to nick-pick over semantics.

If this report has any truth to it, Apple should be applauded for taking action against a retailer that was hoarding stock.

I was considering buying an iPad2 from Best Buy. Glad I didn't. And know i'm reminded not to consider them again in the future.


Every day Apple stores get shipments of iPads....but they don't sell them when the arrive. They hold them for the line that forms the next morning.

Seems odd to me. Like they are purposely making a spectacle in front of the store every morning.

Actually, the point (which was made clear when they started doing this, but you apparently missed) was to avoid a day-long spectacle of people standing in line in front of the store all day in the hopes that a shipment would come in mid day... meanwhile preventing other people from buying other things at the store, and causing disruptions throughout the day in shopping malls for other vendors. If you had seen the 2+ months of lines in front of Apple Stores when the iPhone 4 came out, you'd probably understand better.


Selling the stock (and selling out of it) in the morning and making that clear to people is different from saying "we don't have any" when in fact you do and just would rather not sell them.
 
Normally I'd call bs, but I got mine at Best Buy and my friend a former employ asked if they had any more, the said technically no but for him they'd "find" one. Thank god I got it from there for reward pointssss!

My reward point coupons always come the day after they expire anyways. Plus newegg and amazon are cheaper on most things. Too bad circuit city went down...
 
Good for Apple. Best Buy is downright predatory. They often charge $30 for cables you can by elsewhere for $5 or less. And the whole new Fry's like winding checkout line is so lame. I do like to use Best Buy as an Amazon showroom.
 
:mad:Best Buy told me today that they had them in but Apple would not let them sell them. I have been going for two weeks every other day and they finally tell me they have them and can't sell them. I hate this crap. I want my IPad 2.


Happened to my better half today as well... though not the part about Apple telling BB not to sell them... I thought it might be about commits, and he thought it might be stock piling for an ad... guess we might know the real reason....
 
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Guys Apple is not to blame for this one. Well other than doing business with a sleazy business like Best Buy.

Honestly it has been like eight years since I've entered a Best Buy, everything about the place just feels undesirable and corrupt. The fact that many here are surprised at this non-sense highlights a marginal expectation for ethical behavior. No one really needs to shop at Best Buy, there are plenty of alternatives.
 
Just like nikon pulled their d7000 from best buy? :p

Accept they were pulled for selling them early.

Not that i minded getting it 3 days early :D
 
Obviously you know little about retail and accounting.

Someone is full of themselves. And wrong to boot. You want to move products if you're a retailer, ESPECIALLY if you're a large retailer. And accounting? An accountant could give a crap less if the big boss man decided to hold off on selling a product for whatever reason; he reports and enters the numbers and makes sure the balance sheet is balancing. But since you seem to know so much, please enlighten us all.


Anyway, this is all very strange. Sounds like there's a lot more to this story than we're hearing so far.
 
As best as I can figure, it works like this. Managers get good grades if they sell certain amounts of products.

I'll use low numbers here. Let's say BB corporate wants you to sell at least 5 iPads a day to make your "Quota". One day, 10 iPads come in. You sell all ten, yay, you made quota for the day.

But the next day, none get shipped to the store. So, boo, you didn't make quota, since you didn't have any to sell.
Mr. Manager

So quotas are done on a daily basis and not a weekly basis? WOW. And I thought the quarterly earning reports made companies make bad decisions.
 
I hate going into best buy. It is staffed by a bunch of people in their teens and tweens. That's fine except they tend to think giving a guess as an answer is acceptable when "I don't know" would be a better answer. I never trust them for advice and search for my answers elsewhere. I remember when I bought my first Directv with DVR unit. I asked about the USB port and whether or not you could connect an external drive. The kid looked at it, saw the usb port, and decided that must be what its for and said yes. I had encountered this before and knew not to trust him. Sure enough that port was for programming the unit only. I didn't care in that case as I didn't really need that feature and knew not to trust him anyway. But I have had other instances. Once I asked about an AV receiver and was mad when I got home to find the feature asked about was not existent.

CompUSA used to have better trained employees but then they laid them off because the company thought they were paid too much. It turned into Best Buy. I sent a letter to CompUSA telling them that laying people off would not fix the problems but only make it worse and that I hoped they went out of business for their decision to turn their backs on good employees. I didn't have to weight long for my wish to come true.

Anyway Best Buy is all there is really except for Fry's but that is not conveniently located. I can see the next electronics chain to launch easily topping Best Buy. If they hire people who actually care to learn about the product that is.
 
Doesn't really matter, Best Buy is going the way of Blockbuster and Borders anyway. They will be gone within a few years, once all their media turns digital.
 
Not saying this story is true or false but Best Buy employs non-commissioned based sales staff. There are no quotas to speak of. This is a public company and sales quotas would be accessible to stockholders.

Serves them right. Bastards. It's amazing how easily they sucker people into buying an $80 hdmi cable when they can get a higher quality cable from monoprice for less then five bucks.

I do not intend to be rude, but there is a difference in HDMI cables, no matter what the Internet tells you. Conductors, shielding materials/layers and the way the connectors are put together are a few differentiators. An AudioQuest Coffee cable, for example, which is several hundred dollars ($600 I believe for a 1.5m) is made of pure silver starting with the tips and going the length of the cable. This is not the same as a no name $5 dollar HDMI cable from Amazon.
 
Best Buy is trash!!!
My girlfriend went looking for a ps3 120 in 2009 for my xmas gift but they said they only had the 250 models. Well, she got me the 250 but just two days later Best Buy had them 120s piled high a mother******!
And if any of you remember Elmo Gate from back in the day the same thing. No tickle me Elmos in Wallgreens but a day after xmas they were everywhere.
 
100 dollar reservation

I think this makes somewhat sense... When i went to best buy on launch day they ran out... and then i went back and they were doing $100 pre-orders to be put on a list (which i never ended up doing)... so what they did is had a ton of people pay a hundred bucks to put on a best buy gift card and then "shorten" the supply so that people would have to be impatient and go buy somewhere else--which forced people to spend that hundred dollars at BB.
Kind of a cheap selfish way to make money. hundreds of pre-orders and then only a few ipad sales...
it still doesn't make sense to not sell what you have in stock though... stupid
 
Good for Apple on this. One less retailer over charging for their products. I hope they pull the Apple stores out all together and find a new retail partner.
 
When you are as HUGE as best buy, and you are selling a product as huge as the iPad, it makes sense to create a demand. People do this all the time. You can't get it now, so the second it becomes available to you, you buy it in fear that you might have to wait another month. This happens all the time with a lot of products.

That makes not much sense to me, for I as customer would just go to the next Store/Retailer/Whatever that might have an iPad. Best Buy isn't the only one out there.

But maybe I just can't see the greater idea behind this so called "strategy".
 
Good for Apple on this. One less retailer over charging for their products. I hope they pull the Apple stores out all together and find a new retail partner.

Apple products are price-locked. No second hand retailer marks up on them, like Bose. Retailers are told what to sell at and they comply or they lose rights to sell the product. If these are overpriced, it is Apples doing.
 
no one really knows

i talked to a friend of mine thats a GM of a bestbuy store. He or his regional manager didnt know why or who put the stop sell order
on the ipads this morning. At 6pm they still didnt know why.
The email only said dont sell new in the box ipad 2s, sell through
your preorders and open items. no other instructions
were given. i think they over sold there preorders at some locations.
 
Having managed at several retail giants right out of college, I can give an answer as to why a company might withhold some stock and it's a very simple one...

What if the supplier is abnormally constraining stock of a popular item?

Do you prefer to be out of that item for a week, possibly weeks after it sells out or do you conserve some stock to have some in the store every day and tell some customers you're expecting more the next day?

From what I've read, Apple's shipments of iPads has been constrained.
Clearly, from a retail manager's perspective and even from corporate managers, I could easily see why Best Buy might conserve some stock until Apple gets ramped up and can hit demand. Otherwise your regular customers will get the impression that you're not carrying the product at all and just go buy it somewhere ELSE! At least if you tell them you'll have some more in stock tomorrow, there's a better chance they'll come back the next day.

Trust me, I'm not a big fan of Best Buy, but this appears to be Apple's doing since they forced the issue by making sure their Apple Stores were well stocked and maybe not as much as the retail giants.

Clearly not many people here have managed in sales. If you've got a product you KNOW is going to sell out in a particular time period and you've hit your sales quota and you're not going to get any back in stock for 2-3 weeks, this is not a crazy idea to do.

In my opinion, Apple needs to get its supply chain act together and stop micromanaging other vendors' sales strategies instead.
 
I do not intend to be rude, but there is a difference in HDMI cables, no matter what the Internet tells you. Conductors, shielding materials/layers and the way the connectors are put together are a few differentiators. An AudioQuest Coffee cable, for example, which is several hundred dollars ($600 I believe for a 1.5m) is made of pure silver starting with the tips and going the length of the cable. This is not the same as a no name $5 dollar HDMI cable from Amazon.

And how does this relate to the over-priced cables pushed in best buy? Do you think those rocketfish and dynex (aka house brand) cables they push are better than a MonoPrice cable? I've not used an AmazonEssentials cable before--it is probably good--but you are probably thinking of 3rd party sellers on amazon selling cheap china crap.

There is a market for AudioQuest, but in general, it is not the mfgr that is referred to when satirically commenting about best buy's hdmi (and other) cables.
 
semi apropos...

I dropped by BB this morning to score an iPod Nano. After standing around the diplay for ten minutes with no assistance, I headed over to the cell phone section to find the nearest Blue shirt. Of course, she couldn't leave her section, so she agreed to page someone. The page went out over the P.A., and in the time it took me to walk back to the ipod case, two "window shoppers" had showed up and were conversing amongst themselves about the merchandise.

Naturally, the when the clerk arrived, not knowing which customer needed assistance, she addressed them first. When they politely declined her help, she hovered there and stared over there shoulder as they continued their conversation.

At that point, I politely interjected, "Excuse me, miss, I paged you." She gave me a sideways glance -the barest minimum of an acknowlegement- and snapped, "I'll be with you in a moment."

It was at that point I drove to the Apple Store a block over and completed the transaction where the sales staff practically threw themselves at me.

The moral of this story: Eff Best Buy. They don't deserve to carry Apple products. This headline literally made the whole episode worthwhile.
 
I'll pile on here.

I hate Best Buy.

I miss Circuit City.

I wish there was a Frys in Utah.

There, I feel better. I hope this place suffers. I hate Best Buy.
 
Don't know the facts...

You people don't know the facts and are jumping to conclusions. You need to realize that this is a RUMOR site....
 
Way of base...

The price is set by market conditions to some degree and on the other the producer of the product can set the price despite those conditions.

If you think it is overpriced, then don't buy it. Its that simple. If you owned the Apple, you would price things how you saw fit and influenced by the market conditions. Keep in mind the point of the game is to make money.

Apple products are price-locked. No second hand retailer marks up on them, like Bose. Retailers are told what to sell at and they comply or they lose rights to sell the product. If these are overpriced, it is Apples doing.
 
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