[F]ormer Office Depot employees claim the company has widely told its workers to do things such as adding optional service plans onto clearance items without telling customers. One source says associates would accomplish this by altering pricetags in Photoshop to make the base price look a hundred dollars higher, thereby giving the store the credit for selling the add-on without the customer even knowing.
A Laptop Magazine investigation uncovered the accusations:
Since we published our article about Office Depot associates lying to customers last week, the company has issued an internal memo “reminding” employees not to lie to customers about notebook stock. We’ve also heard from and interviewed a number of additional Office Depot employees from different stores in completely different parts of the country who corroborated our primary source Rich’s account and added more detail, including new allegations that some associates alter the price of clearance items to include the cost of Product Protection Plans or Tech Depot Services.
One of the corroborating accounts:
One scenario in the tech department: I’m putting signs up … and a customer comes in and says ‘I just came from another store. They said you have this [notebook] in stock.’ So I’ll go and check it real quick and sometimes I will have it in stock, sometimes I won’t—and that is actual information. Sometimes I just don’t have it in stock and the other store lied to them. I’ll ask them first: ‘Where did you come from?’ And they’ll say what street or what part of town they came from, and I know all the store numbers so I pull it up and I can check their inventory in real-time and see that they have them [the notebooks] on hand and then I’ll ask them [the customer] did they talk to you about extended warranties or services and they’ll say ‘Yeah, yeah. I don’t need any of that. I just need a laptop.’ Then I know that’s what they did …
The other store will have it in stock, but send the customer to us, just to get them out of the store like they’re doing them a service. [They’ll say something] like ‘Hey, I don’t have it, but they do and I really want you to get this laptop,’ so they can save their own store’s numbers.”
Buyer beware!
Via Techdirt, “These practices are quite illegal, and it looks like the report might trigger some FTC interest, especially given the multiple reports, suggesting that this isn’t just a few rogue employees.”