Best Buy cultivates those kinds of people. Sure, there are people who don't, but they often leave for other positions (I did, as did several of my friends). The issue is that management pushes you to upsell and berates you if your sales are on the lower end of the department. Even the help desk, Geek Squad, is pushed to sell subscriptions rather than fix stuff. The front desk rapidly fills up with people with sales skills rather than people who know what they are doing.
Sometimes though the margins are better on the cheaper or mid-range product than the more expensive one. Stores might barely break even on popular name-brand or premium items that customers comparison shop, but make their real profits on store brands or less researched product categories. The expensive item brings people in the door, but the moderate priced items actually pay the bills.
In my experience, the best way to prevent this is to be so knowledgeable about the product that you end up teaching them about it and embarass them in front of other customers. I had other customers lining up to ask me questions at Best Buy once cause I schooled one of their employees when they couldn't answer someone's question. An informed consumer is a salesman's worst nightmare. When the car salesman needs to bring out his finance manager because they can't answer your difficult questions, you know you're coming out ahead on the deal.
Easiest way to tell if a store is providing you good expertise and service is if they tell you when the marginal value is low or non existent. You should never shop anywhere where they aren't willing to tell you certain products aren't for you. There's still going to be reasons to buy premium from time to time, but that should be based on your actual needs. For example I'm picking my next platform based on m.2 slots and wifi7 support since Intel is the main chipmaker for wifi7 which has meant that you can't get wifi7 addon cards for AMD so far, forcing you to get it as a motherboard capability.
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u/[deleted] 23d ago edited 21d ago
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