Best Buy sued over price-matching denials

A lawsuit alleging deceptive price-match practices at Best Buy stores will proceed under Class Action Certification in New York State, a US District Court judge ruled last week.

We recently covered HDGuru’s own struggles with price matching at Best Buy, and now the website breaks this story, reporting that New York state residents can join plaintiff Thomas Jermyn in the class action suit. In a complaint, Jermyn alleges that Best Buy uses its price match policy "as a ploy, to lure unsuspecting consumers into its stores and to induce them to purchase its merchandise, while allegedly having an undisclosed ‘Anti-Price Matching Policy,’ pursuant to which employees aggressively deny customers’ legitimate price match requests."

The complaint is backed by internal documents, dispositions from two current Best Buy employees and claims from former employees that the retailer promoted an anti-price-matching policy among managers and other key personnel. Best Buy allegedly taught employees how to deny price matches, offered financial incentives that were partly based on this practice and overall denied roughly 100 valid price matches per week, the complaint says.

There appears to be a proverbial smoking gun in HDGuru’s story, in which a member of Best Buy’s Competitive Strategies Group makes light of shoddy price-matching practices in a company memo, but the validity of this document is in dispute. A commenter — whose IP originates from Best Buy headquarters, HDGuru notes — accused the website of "selective editing" and "poor journalism." Best Buy also tells Ars Technica that the memo’s author is a "long-standing employee with a sense of humor."

Michael Braunstein, the attorney representing Jermyn, encourages people interested in joining the lawsuit to contact him at mbraunstein@kgglaw.com or (845) 356-2570. He’ll also listen to complaints from people outside of New York, though they can’t participate in the suit.

On Monday, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said the state is considering its own lawsuit over price-matching. The Hartford Courant, which reported that story, has a copy of the full New York complaint available as a .PDF file.