Best Buy isn't

Eric Goldman pointed me to this story about BestBuy’s internal website used at its physical stores, which apparently looks exactly like BestBuy.com, except that it doesn’t have the sale prices that BestBuy.com often has. Sales representatives have apparently used the internal website to convince customers that sale prices were no longer available. The negligence explanation is incompetence: salespeople didn’t know that they had to log on to the external website to see the web sale prices. Whether deliberate or not, this seems to fall within the definition of “bait and switch” under many state consumer protection laws. In a written statement to a reporter, the company said that its price-match policy included matching prices with the BestBuy.com website. This seems like an odd definition of price matching – to provide the advertised price. If it were clear that BestBuy.com was only loosely connected to Best Buy physical stores, maybe this would make more sense, but I doubt the average consumer sees them as distinct.