Early adopters of new technology fighting for the label of ‘industry standard’ against one or more market rivals are often left despondent, and usually lumbered with obsolete hardware, should they choose to invest in the wrong brand.
Best Buy gifts HD DVD owners with $50 USD compensation after Blu-ray victory. Credit: Best Buy.
Be it Betamax or Laserdisc, more often than not selection misfortune is little more than a bitter elephant-sized pill for the out-of-pocket tech consumer to swallow before begrudgingly swapping out for VHS or DVD.
However, American retail giant Best Buy is this week sporting a glowing consumer halo following the recent demise of Toshiba’s HD DVD video format and the subsequent raising of Sony’s Blu-ray HD platform as the undisputed industry winner.
Specifically, the retail chain announced on Wednesday that it is offering a $50 USD gift card to every one of the 200,000 loyal customers who purchased the (ultimately doomed) HD DVD format from their stores across the United States.
“We’re very committed to moving from a transactional to a relationship space with our customers,” said Brian J. Dunn, Best Buy’s president and COO in a New York Times report. “We don’t want to leave customers hanging.”
While Best Buy’s customer gesture seems rather grandiose for the sake of continued loyalty, it initially appears to pale beside a similar, and much more generous, consumer drive carried out at the beginning of March by fellow retailer Circuit City.
In Circuit City’s case, customers who had bought their HD DVD players at US branches were granted store credit in the full amount of their specific player as long as the returned hardware had not been purchased more than 90 days earlier.
However, unlike Circuit City’s approach, which was executed extremely quietly and not widely advertised (so not as generous as it first seemed), Best Buy will automatically dispatch the $50 USD vouchers to the majority of those customers who purchased their HD DVD players prior to Toshiba officially pulling the business plug on February 23.
Automatic gift cards will be sent out to customers who bought extended warranties for their players, purchased the hardware through Best Buy’s online store, or are signed on with the retailer’s rewards initiative. Everyone else will need to simply show proof of purchase to guarantee their credit offering.
Further customer incentive is provided thanks to Best Buy revealing that it is willing to buy back defunct HD DVD hardware (click here for that opportunity), which will see participating customers rewarded with a second gift card.
Best Buy stands to lose around $10 million USD in its attempts to glisten in the resulting marketplace glow and duly secure some 200,000 HD DVD customers likely to be considering a Blu-ray technology purchase in the not-too distant future.
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