As bad as this is to day, the more "vocal" about a complaint you are the less help you will get. I was in electronics retail sales for 8 years and this is the way it is.
As far as best buys 14 day return policy this is corporate and my old store just had a manager (and good friend of mine) canned because he approved a return outside of this window, the DM canned him. So this return policy is not exactly the managers fault its corporates.
And for everyone crying about how "dumb" the sales people are, heres the lowdown:
PROFESSIONALS DONT WORK FOR $8 AN HOUR! There I said it. The best knowledge was found when employees were commission (at Circuit City anyway) cause you had to know exactly what you were selling a customer in order to not get it returned, cause when it got returned, you lost money. When commission ended, the knowlegable sales guys went to places where they got more money based on their knowledge and ability to sell.
As far as people talking about "the salesguy not knowing advanced questions" If your question is REASONABLE such as "If im using photoshop (provided the employee themselves have used photoshop) will this computer have enough ram to support that?" That is something the sales guy should know. But if you start asking software specific questions (it DOES NOT matter if the store sells the software) and the employee hasnt used that software or heard of it of course they cannot answer your question. Think about it. They dont get free trials to take home, they dont get to use it at work, they're not allowed to open it to test it how are they to know whats in it?
Same thing goes for people who are looking at things NOONE knows about like cordless phones. Noone can tell you which has the loudest ring or what has call waiting with no call indicator light but has large illuminated buttons blah blah because the employee doesnt take all the phones home, try them out, and bring them all back.
Sales people are trained on features such as "what is wireless N, what is megapixel, what is HDMI" the common questions. You cannot go any deeper then this because its just not possible to train a sales guy in something like "What do I need to be able to hook my computer to my home theater system, record satellite feed onto my computers harddrive, encode the video in HD for playback on my Sansa."
People are under the illusion that because the store sells it, an employee should know everything about it. Thats the equivalent of someone expecting a librarian to know everything about every book in the library. In a perfect world that would be nice but in the real world its not doable.
As for the employees, they should be courteous to any customer and if they don't know something they should try and find out, but a lot of the time customers ask something that is just not possible to find out.
Sorry for the rant but seriously a lot of customers expect too much out of electronics store employees and the best advice is to research before you buy.
