Best Buy: Image v. Reality

All Best Buy commercials are basically the same: An employee who looks like working at Best Buy is the absolute thrill of her life tells us about this time when this person came in without Clue One what they wanted, and Omigd it was so Kewl to be able to hold their hand and guide them to whatever overpriced piece of junk the store was trying to pawn off on customers that week, and gosh you should have seen the smile on the customer's face when they walked out the door, it was priceless and it's the reason Life is Still Worth Living.

The most recent one I've seen uses Mother's Day as an excuse to drown us in Good Customer Service Treacle. "This kid came into the store, looking for something for his Mom for Mother's Day, and he knew he didn't want to get just anything, or a video game, but he didn't have a lot of money to spend, so I showed him this really neat keychain, and he could put images of himself with his mom (aside: raise your hands if you carry around downloadable images of yourself with your mom. Anybody? Anybody?) and his mom would look at it and say 'wow, this kid really loves me!'"

As if we arent' already drowning in sickly syrup already, the commercial ends with the Deleriously Happy Employee gurgling "we all think about our moms." Um, ok. Good "point."

Look, it's not that this commercial is so bad- it really isn't. It's just that I've been in a lot of Best Buy stores over the years, and I've never been approached by anyone who looks like my satisfaction as a customer is the Most Important Thing to Them Ever. More often than not, all the Best Buy employees I encounter in a store are forever jabbering away on their Blackberries (I heard one of them tell the person on the other end- LOUDLY- how bad it sucked to work at Best Buy, don't apply here, the manager is a FUCKTARD and he won't give me Saturday off the MFing MFer....) or playing the video games set up to entice CUSTOMERS to buy the latest Brain-Dead Delay Your Adulthood Pointless Toy being peddled to the thirtysomething crowd. The most I have ever gotten out of a Best Buy employee is "you need anything?" or "finding everything ok?" And that's actually all right- I don't want advice from people who I'm sure know which new cell phone is the Must Have Phone of the Month but who probably can't tell a toaster from a clock radio, anyway.

So how about a little honesty, Best Buy? Let's have a commercial in which an employee rags about how she had to stop texting her BFF for five minutes to help some lame-ass loser pick out
a vacuum, like she knows anything vacuums I mean they are all the same, like, right? And then this idiot even asked about a warranty, and I had to go in the back and get Bob the manager 'cause he's like middle-aged and he knows about shit like that. And then you know what happened, Bob rang up the sale under his code key so I didn't even get credit for the sale even after I stopped texting to help and all, the prick.

I'd appreciate that commercial. Because just once, I'd like to be able to watch a commercial and say to myself "that is so what really happens. I am so there."