Bad incentives. Some items were low margin, but almost nothing was so low that it was actually worth losing the sale.
One of the things you were ranked on was PSP (extended warranty, but they beat it into your head never to call it that) attachment percentage. When a measure becomes a target...
Occasionally there was a loss leader sale item, and in those cases if someone wanted to by it without any attachments, it might have made short term financial sense to pretend we didn't have it, but I don't think the company could get away with that on a large scale.
Source: I also worked there during college. First in customer service, then as a Geek Squad supervisor at a new store, and I was sent to training at HQ up in Minnesota.
My favorite was when we started focusing heavily on close rate. Close rate was just the number of transactions divided by the number of people who walked in the door, so someone proposed that we start breaking up people's purchases into multiple transactions.
I proposed a counter solution--we just move the laser sensor on the door a bit higher, so that short people wouldn't trigger it.
I worked in an electronics store (regional, not Best Buy, and out of business now) in the mid-2000s that had this exact measure.
In my store, on busy days, the manager would occasionally "greet" customers at the door for 10 minutes at a time. Coincidentally, the spot he would choose to stand would block the sensor, so instead of 20 customers coming in in 10 minutes, it looked like only 1 had come in.
Sounds like when I worked at Radio Shack. Not so much with warranties but with names and addresses. We did get a bonus for each extended warranty we sold.
One of the things you were ranked on was PSP (extended warranty, but they beat it into your head never to call it that) attachment percentage. When a measure becomes a target...
Occasionally there was a loss leader sale item, and in those cases if someone wanted to by it without any attachments, it might have made short term financial sense to pretend we didn't have it, but I don't think the company could get away with that on a large scale.
Source: I also worked there during college. First in customer service, then as a Geek Squad supervisor at a new store, and I was sent to training at HQ up in Minnesota.