Get your blue shirt ready, we're going to Best Buy for open box tech.
on @thisis
on @DNKI
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Chapter Titles:
0:00 Ordering Open Box Tech
2:03 In Store Pickup
2:52 Gaming Laptop
4:21 Something Isn't Right…
5:30 Xbox
7:17 SSD
9:34 Smartphone
11:07 Earbuds
14:09 Graphics Card
Best Buy employee here, open box is one of the best ways to get a good deal on a laptop but it really is luck of the draw. I got an almost brand new galaxy book for half off with the accessories and all but before that I bought a tablet and I had to return it because it would power cycle on its own. Never buy open box online always go to the store if you can to inspect the unit!
Or don’t, wait a week or so, get the extra $10 or $20 dollars you were saving and buy a new one
With the laptop, it almost looks like there needs to be some sort of chipset update that wasn’t done after the fresh install of windows.
Yeah, wish Austion would steer his channel more into techy stuff, but I get that’s what he choose not to some years ago. I just want some more details tbh. He should send it to a youtube and do like a mini collab š
What I don’t get is if they reinstalled Windows on it, why wouldn’t they use the laptop’s own recovery image to do it, which would have all the correct drivers slipstreamed in. Weird.
@Clay Cassin sometimes i get computers with ms accounts on them and i have no other choice than to reinstall via external media.
The ping ponging to me screams poorly attached cooling. My guess is unscrewing, cleaning, putting on new TIM, and putting the cooler back on and the performance will straighten out.
Could be a good savings but I think it’s not worth it if you have to do that to get it to work correctly.
@Andrew Alexander this. I don’t think chipset drivers are required for a computer to get the gist of “Need power? Here’s power.” That ping-ponging seems more like just extremely rapid cases of thermal throttling. Either very poorly attached cooling, or NOT attached cooling. Maybe the reason it was returned was cause the previous owner tried to “upgrade” the thermal paste and ended up borking the reattachment.
From my experience the accuracy of descriptions and quality really varies from store to store.
Itās really convenient given that I literally have a package from Best Buy arriving tomorrow thatās also a ālike newā smartphone. Good to see what I should expect
If thereās no visible cosmetic damage check the battery on it! Would help and see if the open box is worth it or not
Best buy employee here. That’s pretty much open box. It’s a luck of the draw for the most part. However, I have seen some open box laptops that go for a decent price and have been marked “satisfactory”.
Former geek squad here, when an item is an open box and the new version is on sale, depending on the store, you can negotiate a lower price for the open box. You can get some great deals like this but you have to know if a new item is on sale or not first.
Why would anyone admit to being part of “Geek Squad”? You people do everything you can to rip people off.
@Haiden Geary I wasnāt part of the sales team, I did repairs and my job of repairing computers. I am just letting you know from my experience working in stores what I saw in terms of open box. Idk what the company did to hurt you like that but that has nothing to do with me.
@Haiden Geary Not necessarily true. It depends on the team there as well as the leadership at the store. I quite frequently would replace RAM if I had spares, and would discount services for a lot of clients.
Ex BBY employee insider tips: Always shop in store in for the item. If you can tell the item has been there a couple weeks you can usually talk the floor manager into a bigger discount. (One of the store Metrics was how long this stuff sits). The floor manager is more willing to cut you a deal if you shop on a busy weekend night, they can hide the “erosion” or discount when there’s a bigger overall daily sales volume. If its a laptop and your bring up you’ll tack on a service like Geek Squad accidental protection, floor manager will sometimes drop the price down to the next cheaper tier of GSP thus also saving you some extra cash.
Depends on the store in all honesty I’ve worked at some where they wouldn’t budge regardless and others where they will budge but only if they apply for cards or memberships…you already know the big push on those 2…edit: if there are missing accessories or have marks that aren’t listed you can definitely get a discount i always recommend going to the store. And buying…buying online sucks for open boxes never know what your getting usually
We do also drop it into fair or satisfactory to just lower the price. 7/10 I usually will sell open box first and explain to customers that nothing wrong and show them !
Corporate policy doesnāt allow for bargaining in the store.
They arenāt following company procedure.
@MZRinFaith your definitely right about the policy. I always tell customers that as well and stand by it mainly because i don’t make commission so what do i gain by giving you a discount…the store is taking a loss at that point but if there are damages not taken account for then that’s different.
I love best buy open box deals. The best is when the item goes on sale because the open box price can scale
I had similar problems with laptops with this limitation of CPU.
For me it was the battery that was holding back, as an emergency limitation.
If you remove the battery and start up the computer it will run beautifully fast.
As far as the missing packaging goes, I completely put that back on the consumers. So many people are like children on Christmas morning where they just tear into things, and toss anything every which way that they believe is packaging, or owner’s manual, or warranty card. They lose vital pieces that are too small to notice, maybe in a tiny bag that is taped to the plastic wrapping, and they simply toss the plastic wrapping halfway across the room, believing it to be complete garbage, and forever losing those vital screws until they do some thorough spring cleaning five years from now, stumble upon the screws, and wonder, “What the hell are these for?” They manage to do all of this destruction before they have even determined if the device is suitable for their situation, or if it is compatible with what they need it to be, or if the dang device even functions as it should! They discover that it isn’t what they want, or it doesn’t do what they thought it did, typically from their own ignorance, and lack of doing any research to know what you are buying, and god forbid, what you need exactly. So, they pack it back up, missing packaging, although they have it right there on their living room floor, but they simply do not care, “Not my problem!”, or they don’t want to hassle with attempting to make everything fit back inside of the box, mainly caused by a lack of cognitive capacity coupled with tearing into the device so haphazardly, that they can not even begin to recall how things were positioned inside of the box to allow everything to fit. Yeah, I totally put 99.9999% of any of those open box items that are missing either packaging material, parts, or even the box itself, completely on the consumers. I’m sure Best Buy will lose a few things here and there, but I highly doubt their track record even comes close to comparing with consumers!!!!
With that being said, I have managed to acquire some really good deals on open box items. Depending on what the device is, and its likelihood of failing or developing some type of functional issue, I will use the money I saved to purchase an extended warranty, and many of the deals I have managed to get, the savings were still more than what the cost of the extended warranty cost! I would definitely recommend going to the store, and physically examining the device rather than ordering online, if you have that choice.
For the laptop, I think it would’ve been worth it to reset the cmos or fully reset the bios.
I think thats the only explaination for the weird clock speeds.
I took a chance on a “Like New” mouse on Amazon, and it was basically perfect. I saved over 50% on it, if I recall correctly.
I did this with an Hdmi cord. Most of the time its just people that didn’t want it anymore.
EX BBY employee here, we would often mark things as open-box fair for items that were in perfect condition just so we could get it off the floor. odds are, it’s probably excellent, but you have to roll the dice.
Ex employee tip: always go IN STORE. They will usually knock the price down a bit plus theyre usually just immediately returned or hardly opened. they just cant TECHNICALLY sell them as “new” anymore since the seal has been broken.
My experience with open-box items has been mostly positive, recent one was I got a Lenovo Ideapad Gaming 3 at Best Buy as a open-box model in “Fair” condition but it was entirely brand new, packaging and all, even the seal on the packaging itself was untouched. and got it for 500$, thanks Best Buy for mislabeling it lol.
Specs are Ryzen 5 5600H and 3050 TI, so not bad at all
it honestly most likely had been mislabeled on purpose. at one of the locations i worked at, we would have a certain model of dell laptop labelled satisfactory consistently regardless of condition because we had so many of them open box that we needed them cheaper to get rid of them faster. there wasn’t anything wrong with them, they just shipped with AMD processors and single channel ram, so people who didn’t know that that kicks your performance in the shins or didn’t want to install a ram upgrade would just bring it back.
In the last year I bought two open box “excellent” items from Best Buy online. One was a very well spec’d HP Envy 15 for about $600 cheaper than a similarly equipped new unit from HP. Also got a Sony X90k for about $150 cheaper than a new one. Both had all of the original packaging and components, both looked brand new, both work excellent.
As many former/current employees have already mentioned, always buy open box items in store. Buying them online is luck of the draw, if you visit a store and the unit is not as described you can always negotiate for a lower price. I’m a current Geek Squad employee and I work on open boxes all the time, there are usually more careful when working on those in store then when you buy it online.
Saved a ton of money when I bought an open box gaming monitor from Best Buy Canada last year and Iām not convinced it wasnāt new. Every single peel was still in place and I couldnāt tell if the product had ever actually come out of the box. Would recommend.
I almost always buy open box from Best Buy. Great way to save money on a product I was already going to buy. Never had a bad experience myself
I guess I’ve just gotten really lucky over the years. I’ve probably bought 6 or 7 different things from BestBuy open box over the last 3 years. All were described as “Excellent” condition and it literally looked like it had been opened and just returned the next day.
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