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by bluedino 1390 days ago
>> he would go to Best Buy, get talked up by a salesperson about a nice new printer, and buy it.

In a past life I worked at Best Buy, and the standard printer sales tactics were nuts. If a customer wanted to buy a printer, you were supposed to sell them:

  2 packs of color ink (remind the customer that the included cartridges are only half-full)
  2 packs of black ink
  4 reams of regular paper
  2 packages of photo paper
  GOLD printer cable
  The Best Buy Service Plan, of course
4 comments
doubled112 1390 days ago
The GOLD printer cable used to get me.

At Staples they also told us something about better USB cables for faster, more reliable printing.

How bad does your existing USB cable need to be before it starts to cause your printing to fail? Stop running it over with your chair.

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muttled 1390 days ago
Reminds me of a story of a printer I installed for a customer (could have been Lexmark? It was a very cheap printer). It came with an unpowered USB hub which I thought was odd. The printer was not printing right. I happened to read the instructions for once out of frustration and it mentioned that you MUST use the USB hub. That didn't make any sense as usually a troubleshooting step is to remove the USB hub. But when I put the hub into the chain, the printer started working correctly. I wish I still had the model number to prove it, but there were knowledgebase articles about the hub being required. Probably to correct some mistake in manufacturing where it was cheaper to include the hub than fix all the printers.
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marpstar 1390 days ago
Fellow former $BBY-er here... you gotta admit, the bundle pricing Best Buy ran on all of that stuff (with the purchase of a new printer, of course) made it so easy to talk them into it.

When I started I had just left commission-based sales in electronics at Sears and I was amazed at how much better Best Buy was at pushing accessories with big ticket items.

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calvinmorrison 1390 days ago
Best Buy has certainly felt the competition though. I went in and got a USB-C to USB-C cable for 8 bucks.

It's nice to see the market drive bad practices away through competition.

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JohnFen 1390 days ago
This kind of thing is one item in the long list of reasons why I stopped shopping at Best Buy.
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