Best Buy — Local services in Minot

TLDR: Don’t use Best Buy to send your authorized Apple repairs through unless you don’t want your device back for weeks because they will not even send it out for at least a week.

Rant about Best Buy’s geek squad in Minot ND and being an authorized apple repair. Last week we took my son’s iPhone 13 there to be diagnosed and sent for repairs due to overheating and not holding a charge, this was after calling Apple and they said to do this. They couldn’t give more diagnostics other than they were “pretty sure it’s a battery issue”. Cool. Either way, they said they’d send it to Apple because their authorized person to fix it is out on maternity leave and the phone is still covered under apples limited warranty because it was purchased less than a year ago. Said turnaround time was usually 2-3 days to get a phone back because of minot not being the best location for overnight stuff. Fine I get that. My son was getting ready to leave to travel with his grandparents for a month but I can handle a couple days. Fast forward to yesterday, it has been a week since we dropped it off and I’ve seen no movement on the tracking they gave me through Best Buy other than a work task had been created. So I decide to stop down there and see if they can get me something more accurate. Well, they come out and tell me “oh we haven’t even sent it out yet, that’s our bad”. What? Then they explain they were having a hard time printing off the shipping label. For a week? Then they assure me that it will go out today and we should have something in a couple days. I asked what they could do today as I’m not prepared to send my child off through an airport without any way to communicate to us or his grandparents. Their solution, “well you can buy a new phone today and when the repair comes back just return it since you would have 15 days to return.” Not a choice as our son will leave before that and I clearly can’t count on their 2-3 day estimate. They then offered to upsell us a program that would allow us to have 60 days to return the new purchase phone. I’m not dropping hundreds of dollars (even if I would get it back when returned) because y’all messed up. So the only thing they could do to reconcile their mess up was to say sorry. Went back today, and the phone did not in fact go out yesterday as promised. The young lady at the counter today said that FedEx hadn’t picked up from them since Thursday (which honestly seems suspicious for a big name brand chain like this ) and then said they actually have to schedule picks ups with FedEx. This leads me to believe that they just plain out never scheduled for the phone to be picked up. I told them that if it did not get picked up from them tomorrow then I would take it to FedEx myself since they can’t seem to figure out how to do that. Now I have had to send my child off traveling the airports with no form of communication with us because they can’t do something as simple as mail out a phone and if it does get back during his time away from us, we will be in the hole for the shipping to his location, all because they messed up and didn’t even have the good sense to call and say they screwed up. So unless you want to be without a phone for weeks on end, don’t go through Best Buy. You’re better off taking a weekend trip and making the 8 hour one way trip to Minneapolis and taking it directly to the Apple...

Excellent customer service from one employee (Chris), so-so service from others. But overall, I would recommend this business.

I had bought a portable speaker (Ion Sport) to help me MC a youth event. I chose this model because of the Bluetooth capabilities and microphone accessory. I wanted to be able to play songs from my smartphone throughout the event as well as use the microphone to announce different parts of the program, etc. The night of the event, I unfortunately discovered that the sound was very tinny, with no bass, but having no time for an alternative, we did the best we could with what we had.

I brought the speaker back for an exchange or return. The employee in charge of the stereo department helped me look at alternative speakers since they had no more of my product in stock. However, there were none in my price range that had the advertised capabilities of my original model.

Instead of just telling me I was out of luck, Chris went the extra mile and tested my speaker with me right there. He pointed out that no sound was coming from the large speaker, just the smaller speaker. (I was too distracted the night of the event to figure that out.) He determined that the speaker must have been defective out of the box.

After checking for all the parts and making sure there was no damage, he offered to either refund the whole thing now or reorder another speaker and have it delivered to the store with service orders to check for functionality with me present.

There was a question, however, about the return/exchange since it was a Monday and apparently the 15-day return period had ended on Sunday. Still, because I had bought the +/- $20 protection plan, they used that as the basis for return.

I very much appreciated Chris' attitude and willingness to make things right. Unfortunately, the three other employees at the return desk that helped me, including the Manager on Duty, seemed to struggle with the mechanics of the return. They were about ready to enter it in their system in a way that disadvantaged me, but Chris happened to come by and, surprised at seeing me still there and the confusion of the other employees, he suggested a way to enter the return that both satisfied me and the requirements of their accounting system.

Even though this return/exchange took about 3x longer than I expected, I'm grateful for the excellent customer service I received from Chris and the hope that I can get another product that will hopefully meet my...

Horrid and sketchy customer service, fair selection of product if you can handle the waste of time it takes to get an installation or a repair in the event an item malfunctions. Best buy has a fair selection of product, however geek squad is mediocre at best on there understanding of technology. When buying product, many times employees will try to upsell and give you junk you don't need claiming it's required only to find out later that it isn't. This practice makes them sketchy at best in the retail industry. This store has a horrible understanding of customer service, I ordered in a part was told it was in, dropped my vehical off and then was told they couldn't install it as the part wasn't there, they somehow lost it. Had to get another remote starter and was told last minute that they couldn't install it as I threatened legal action after they refused to refund or install a remote start in my car. Ridiculous at best and horrid management. A huge waste of time and energy over a remote start, and the sad thing is this store has this as a reputation, when I told people who was installing my remote start they scoffed, apparently this is how they typically run their buisness, had another co-worker who bought a washer from them and they said the same thing, tech services were never out when they were scheduled, magically telephone conversations were lost and they had no record of them. Find another place to do your shopping, your time is more valuable then having someone was hours of your time lolygaging and...