Best Buy's Shady Pricing Scam Unravels

Reading stuff like this makes me lose what faith I had left in corporate America. You probably won't believe it, but here goes.

Many big box retailers let you use "price matching" when you come into their store, a policy which lets you get the same price that a competitor charges or, in the case of Best Buy, pay the same price in the store that Best Buy charges on its website. Sounds great, but customers were finding themselves puzzled when they checked the price of something they were about to pay for at a Best Buy store. When using the store's in-house computers, the prices on bestbuy.com didn't look quite as low as they remembered at home. In other words: Web prices were somehow higher when you were shopping inside Best Buy.

The answer to this riddle has finally turned out to be something quite noxious: Best Buy has been using a secret intranet site inside its stores. It's a private version of its public website that looks identical to bestbuy.com, with one key distinction: The prices are considerably higher. George Gombossy of the Hartford Courant sussed this out with some old-fashioned in-store sleuthing and reports on it in detail here.

Best Buy has finally admitted that the secret site exists, and it's facing formal investigation by the state of Connecticut. However, Best Buy says it never intended to mislead anyone... perhaps claiming that the prices on the intranet were just mistakes, not intentionally inflated. Hmmm, sounds fishy to me. What do you think?