Best Buy price match plus rewards
I live in the Bay Area (California), and we've been waiting not-so-patiently for these Vizio P-series displays to show up for the last several weeks. Every few days, Best Buy's website has been rolling back the date when they're supposed to be in stores: 4-13, 4-18, 4-22... Today, we're seeing 4-27. I tried calling a couple of nearby stores to get a fix on what's going on, but the results were no better. A couple of reps had never heard of the new P series; a couple more were looking forward to them but didn't know when they might show up so we could go in and play with one.
Today, we finally decided we knew enough to pull the trigger on a P65-C1 sight-unseen, so I came to Best Buy to put one on order. Up till now, we could have ordered one for delivery around the time when they were supposed to show up in stores, but today, the message was "Not available near your zip code" and "Sorry, delivery dates not available right now." I couldn't even put it into my online shopping cart. BestBuy.com wouldn't take my money.
I called Best Buy.com to see when they might have stock again, but the customer service rep told me that she could see nothing more about it than I could see. No warehouse restocking dates, nothing. I knew as much as she knew.
"You poor thing!" I told her. "You must get slammed for that all the time."
"We do," she said. And she sounded pretty unhappy about that. But then she volunteered that if I called a local store, they had the ability to see things in inventory that she couldn't see, and they might be able to help me. "We used to see that data too," she said. "But they took it away from us."
I hung up and tried to reach Vizio next, just to see if they might have any more firm information about when they could deliver. Nope, the live chat person told me, all she could do was tell me that my order would ship in 30 days. That was it.
"But what info do you have on your own stock?" I asked.
"The only information we have for them is that it can take up to 30 days to ship," she replied.
Unbelievable!
I followed up on the tip from the demoralized Best Buy staff and called a nearby store. He looked in inventory and told me that three stores in the region appeared to haveone P65-C1 each, but they were over an hour from his store. I called the one nearest to me--an hour away--and spoke to a rep there, and that's when I finally hit paydirt. He was a great guy. He walked back into the warehouse to clap eyeballs on the P65 in its box, he looked up my address and found out that, yes, they *could* give me free delivery if we came into the story to make the purchase, and he even told me that when we came in, we could play with the P75, which was up in their Magnolia section.
"That's great news," I said. "Now I'm feeling lucky. So I'm going to push my luck--will you price-match the five-percent-off coupon from Vizio?" He checked with his manager, and the manager said that since we were driving an hour just to get there, he sure would.
So we spent the evening on a road trip. We had fun playing with the 75-inch unit. We got the tablet and set it to Thomas's settings, and it had nice sharp detail and beautiful shadows and blacks. The color looked realistic, not blown out and "vivid" like the other displays around it. The P75 wasn't running glorious dedicated content like the Samsungs and Sony displays were. It wasn't even running 4K like they were; the team had hooked it up to a Blue-ray player and played Star Wars: The Force Awakens content for us. Our Best Buy rep said he had asked his Vizio contact for dedicated input, and it's on the way, but it hasn't arrived yet. He's looking forward to seeing what the display can do.
Anyway, we bought the P65 from Best Buy and got their free delivery--and free removal and delivery of the replacement if anything's wrong with the unit. We got five percent off the price (and no hassle about how this was a one-time special favor, either). And since April has that nice ten-percent-back-in-rewards offer for the Best Buy credit card, we did that too. Five percent off the "sale price," plus $190 in rewards coming back to us. I'm pretty sure we'll find something to spend those on.