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No Allegiance to Pledges

Best Buy has introduced a new series of television ads, where their troupe of not-an-employee-but-I-play-one-on-TV makes a series of pledges designed to pull customers into the stores. They make promises like:

‘I pledge to set up your HD right.‘

‘I pledge to beat anyone’s price.‘

‘I pledge to show this off to my girlfriends.‘

“That new ad campaign isn’t all it’s pledged up to be.”

Now, apart from the obvious perverted possibilities of that last one, these are just the sort of pledges that you might want your local electronics store employee to make. I’ve got a Best Buy close to my house, and they’re the sort of promises I’d want them to make.

So I visited my local Best Buy, to check things out. I discovered that the employees there had apparently also made some pledges — but they were different pledges. Pledges like:

‘I pledge to keep tapping on my keypad for no apparent reason and ignoring all of your attempts to get my attention.‘

‘I pledge to ‘check the stockroom’ for the MP3 player you asked about, only to return slackjawed, empty-handed and reeking of cigarette smoke twenty minutes later.‘

‘I pledge to treat you like a respectable and reasonable human being — until you decline the warranty option on your new washing machine, at which point I shall behave as though you were a two-headed mongoloid leper for the rest of the transaction.‘

‘I pledge to ring up your camcorder without adjusting the price to include the discount, hoping that you won’t notice.‘

‘I pledge to spend half my shift convincing you that you need the latest pimped-out laptop with the integrated camera, DVD recorder, and plush heated keyboard, though you’ve insisted repeatedly that you only want to play solitaire and email your grandchildren.‘

‘I pledge to jibber-jabber for forty-five minutes about home networking with the hot chick in the belly shirt instead of answering your simple question, even though we both know the girl couldn’t spell ‘DSL’ if you gave her the ‘D’ and the ‘S’ and three free guesses.‘

Luckily, all I needed was a computer cable and a new CD. But for anything more than that, I’m not sure I’d go back to Best Buy. That new ad campaign isn’t all it’s pledged up to be.