A Reddit user says a Best Buy order for an ASUS TUF GeForce RTX 5080 ended with a box of rocks instead of a $1,200 graphics card. The buyer placed the order on 25 November and received it on 28 November. According to his post, the card shipped with shipping labels stuck directly to the retail GPU box, no outer brown carton, and a seal that already looked tampered with.
So you chargeback the purchase on your card, and never shop with the dying retailer again. Best Buy provides absolutely no service that is unique and unavailable elsewhere.
Correct. While a chargeback is a last resort, if the consumer is not lying, then Best Buy advertised a GeForce RTX 5080, but instead gave worthless rocks while taking the consumer’s money. That is fraud and the consumer is well within his rights to seek a chargeback. Then the credit card company can seek the damages from the retailer, which they will almost certainly pay because they don’t want an outside fraud investigation which could find them criminally liable. Of course when it is on them to investigate, they will find for themselves, take the money, and keep the product, and hope the consumer just goes away. A credit card company with its own lawyers will not, so at that point it’s just good business sense to refund the money. It puts them at net zero anyway, as opposed to being up $1200. They were never at risk of being down $1200, which isn’t that much for a company the size of Best Buy to fight for stealing from a consumer. They’ll do it if they can get away with it, but if they can’t, they’ll cave.
Or alternatively, whoever was responsible for shipping did that, but that’s not the customer’s problem. The customer only has a contract with Best Buy, so if the GPU did get pinched in transit, then that’s between Best Buy and the shipping company.
Charge backs are a super useful lever to pull when all else has failed. They’re usually so rapidly resolved that I sometimes find myself wishing I could use them as a first resort and not have to deal with the merchant. Alas, that’s not how it works, but it is nice to have a fallback.