The customer isn’t always right, but not everyone relishes the challenge of proving them wrong. That’s exactly the predicament Dallas (@dallas_ponso) found himself in one day while working at Best Buy. In a viral TikTok video that has garnered over 921,000 views, Dallas recounts the peculiar complaint.
“A customer walked up to me with a piece of paper yesterday that said ‘dual-channel wireless projector.’ He handed it to me and said ‘Do you guys carry these?’”
A quick search on the Best Buy app revealed that no such item was in stock.
“I pulled out my phone and looked it up in the app and it only pulled up normal projectors so I flipped my phone around. I said ‘I don’t think so. I’m just seeing normal projectors.’”
After informing the customer that the item wasn’t in stock at Best Buy, Dallas offered to check on Google to see if it was available at any nearby stores. There was just one problem.
“Except when I put it into Google, the product didn’t even really exist. At least I couldn’t find it. A dual-channel wireless projector just wasn’t a thing. I just kept finding links to normal projectors,” Dallas continued.
Dallas probed the customer with some questions to pinpoint exactly what the customer was looking for.
“I said ‘Who told you that you needed this device?’ and he said ‘The guy at Walmart. He said that’s all I needed to connect my home theater speakers, surround sound speakers to my subwoofer.’”
“I said ‘Are you sure he wasn’t talking about a two-channel amplifier? We carry those.’ He said ‘I have no idea. I don’t know anything about any of this stuff.’ I said ‘Well, let me take you over there and I can show you.’”
As Dallas tells it, once he and the customer reached the amps, the customer declined to purchase any of them due to the price—starting at $200—and then insisted on seeing the $40 adapter instead.
“I kept having to reiterate that we didn’t have it and he just didn’t accept it, just wouldn’t believe it. So eventually, I’m like ‘What brand subwoofer do you have?’ and he goes ‘Oh, it’s a Samsung.’”
A couple more probing questions led to Dallas finally looking to Google for some answers.
“So I looked it up, ‘do Samsung wireless subwoofers connect to any other branded speaker’ and it said no, unless it’s the soundbar that came with the sub,” Dallas said.
“I said ‘Well it doesn’t connect with any other speakers but it’ll connect with your TV via Bluetooth’ and showed him the information on Samsung’s website.”
This caught the customer by surprise, as he was adamant that the speakers were compatible with the Samsung subwoofer.
“And he said ‘No, you can definitely connect these speakers that I have. They were advertised to do that.’ I said ‘Well, what speaker brand is it?’ and he goes ‘Oh, I don’t know. I can’t remember. It’s been a year since I bought them.’”
“I said ‘Well do you remember where you bought them?’ and he said ‘Yeah, I got them off Temu.’”
The incredulous look on Dallas’ face says it all.
After a pause, Dallas continues with the story. “I said ‘Well, chances are it’s probably not gonna connect with the subwoofer. The website says it’s not going to. I wouldn’t think there’s a workaround for it.’”
Defiantly, the customer decides that Dallas can’t help him, but another Best Buy employee might be able to.
“He goes ‘Well, there probably is but thanks for your time,’ and walks away [...] [to] ask my coworker for the same item, and says that I told him that we had it.”
Dallas wraps up the video with an ending to the story that was predictable to almost everyone—except the customer.
“My co-worker looked it up and told him eventually the same thing I did, and then after like 30 minutes, the guy finally accepted that it wasn’t going to pair and left the building.”
Temu is an online, Chinese-owned marketplace known for selling discounted items. Often it'll give away goods to folks who post about their products.
Since the app debuted in America in 2022, it's become one of the most downloaded apps. As Time magazine wrote in 2022:
"But the company—the U.S. offshoot of Chinese e-commerce giant Pinduoduo—is also starting to develop a reputation for undelivered packages, mysterious charges, incorrect orders, and unresponsive customer service. Temu has already been subject to more than 30 complaints to the Better Business Bureau, and has a BBB customer rating of less than 1.5 stars."
Several people in the comment section were stunned by this customer’s faith in any electronic purchased from Temu.
“Hearing [‘off Temu’] would [have] put me in [an] early grave,” one comment read.
“[I] remember when nobody used [eBay] [because] they were scared of being scammed but now people use sites like [Temu] without a second thought,” someone else said.
@dallas_ponzo My last relationship had more compatibility
♬ original sound - Dallas
“Being in retail is like walking people through [the] 5 stages of grief until they reach acceptance,” another person wrote.
Dallas did not immediately respond to the Daily Dot’s request for comment. We also reached out to Temu for comment.
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The post ‘People use sites like Temu without a second thought’: Best Buy worker issues warning when Walmart tells customer he just needs a $40 adapter appeared first on The Daily Dot.
