Circuit City 1 Price Promise…Thanks

Circuit City has announced that they’ll have a website with one price that will be the same as their store prices.  So, you ask, what’s so novel about that?

According to the Consumerist, “The state attorney general’s office has started an investigation into whether Best Buy maintains a secret intranet site that may have been used by some salesmen to deny customers discounts that appear on the company’s public Internet site.”

That’s right, Best Buy’s website has a lower price than their stores’, and when you are in their stores and try to access their website to prove to the salesman that the price is wrong, you find a matching Best Buy website with the same prices as their stores.  That’s because they have two websites.

The Consumerist went on to say, “Regardless of current legality, we think maintaining an identical website with different prices is a deceptive practice and should be investigated. The State’s Attorney will also be investigating other chain stores to see if the practice is common. Are there any Consumerist readers who would like to take it upon themselves to document these practices in other stores, or at Best Buy? Photos would be helpful.”

So that brings us back to Circuit City.  Here’s what they had to say:

“One Price Promise assures Circuit City shoppers that they will be treated fairly and equally regardless of how they shop with us,” said Jeff Maynard, vice president, marketing at Circuit City Stores, Inc. in a press release. “Customers have been telling us how important this is to them, and we want to give them a strong and competitive value proposition when making purchases.”

“We plan to let consumers know about One Price Promise in a big way,” added Maynard. “We are launching an aggressive national advertising campaign that includes print, broadcast, Internet and in-store marketing tools, and we believe this message of consistency, simplicity and transparency will resonate strongly with consumers in today’s world.”

Gee, should we give Circuit City kudos for not trying to bait and switch us?

Comcast Faces The Music

Comcast, the nation’s largest cable company, violated fed guidelines when it blocked and degraded web traffic by blocking peer to peer (file sharing) traffic, which it called “reasonable network management.”

Consumer rights groups fought this big brother approach to managing the internet, and the FCC investigated them and found that they viloated FCC Principles.

Kevin Martin of the FCC said, “The commission has adopted a set of principles that protects consumers’ access to the internet,” he told the Associated Press on Thursday night. “We found that Comcast’s actions in this instance violated our principles.”

Comcast faced further public outrage after it admitted to paying people off the street to sit at a public hearing at Harvard, while members of the public were prevented from attending. 

This decision should serve as a warning to other internet providers, and will hopefully prevent them from meddling in internet traffic.

Thanks to Wired for the story.