Payton Place

Connecting to the internet while on an airplane is something I’ve wanted to do for quite some time. Although Virgin America Airlines has provided this service since they began flying in the United States, I don’t live near any of the cities to which they fly! But today, after a “parked on the runway for 2 1/2 hours at O’Hare International delay,” due to inclement weather, I had the opportunity to give an in-flight internet offering called Gogo, a service of AirCell, a test run.

The service costs $9.95 for the duration of the flight. Considering today’s flight segment is just from Chicago to Boston, that’s a very expensive network connection for a 2 1/2 hour flight. But you only live once, right?

The second thought I had after paying for the service was, “How fast is this connection going to be? So before using the service for anything that I “needed” to do, I browsed to DSLReports.Com to run my favorite flash-based speed test. Wow, it is much faster than I expected. In fact, it is nearly as fast as my office DSL service by AT&T. As you can see from the speed report, download speed was greater than 2 megabits per second and upload speed was over 400 kilobits per second. Not too shabby, eh?

For the very first time in dozens of prior transactions, the BestBuy In-Store Pickup promise finally came true. It was a painless and relatively fast experience after walking into the store and waiting in line for approximately five minutes. Hooray!!!

Ordering merchandise online at BestBuy.Com is always a piece of cake. I verified my desired items were in-stock locally, flagged the purchase for In-Store Pickup, and paid for them in the traditional online fashion. I even applied a coupon received from my BestBuy Reward Zone account successfully. But of course, visiting my local Best Buy store (we only have one) on a Sunday afternoon nearing 4pm was a dicey proposition. That store is typically packed with customers during that time of day.

Fortunately, while standing in line amongst a sea of others waiting to resolve customer service issues, a representative noticed my clearly visible In-Store receipt while I held it alongside my purchasing credit card and I.D. She asked me to move to a different line to retrieve my goods. No one was in that line! (shock of all shocks) Thereafter, I was limited only by the amount of time it took to scan the receipt, verify my identity, and sign the pickup receipt. Sixty seconds max! That’s the way this process should occur. Unfortunately, nothing could be farther from the planned truth at my local BestBuy.

A sign above a customer service register used to indicate a dedicated location for transacting In-Store pickups. But before today, it didn’t seem to matter which time of day I appeared to collect my goods, no staff ever manned that register. So I’ve always been forced to wait for other “Customer Service” patrons to complete their transactions before advancing in line. The In-Store Pickup sign is no longer displayed at my local BestBuy. I wonder what’s up with that?

If you’ve ever been in a similar customer service line at such a retailer, you know that typical transactions in this area take lots of time. There I stand with receipt and I.D. in hand, only to wait for Ma & Pa Kettle to purchase and configure their first computer using an unapproved new account with a BestBuy credit card. They are clueless and the folks in line behind them are just as clueless about their surroundings.

This is just one example but I can quote many more. Most similar customer service transactions take an inordinate amount of time to complete. So to Place the In-Store Pickup sign in this area is fraught with issues from the get-go. The moral of the story is, BestBuy, please provide a method for your In-Store Pickup patrons to collect their goods without forcing them to wade through the endless sea of other Customer Service patrons first . . .

~SP

Free application UnChrome bolsters your browsing anonymity by removing the unique ID from Google Chrome that Google associates with your Chrome installation.

UnChrome isn’t the first app to do this; we highlighted another program called Chrome Privacy Guard in our power user’s guide to Google Chrome. But for the many who installed Chrome for the first time after Chrome officially left beta last week, it’s worthwhile to highlight this kind of tool once more. UnChrome is a free download, Windows only.