No, No, No

My wife is also very good at saying "No" to the requests for our phone number when purchasing merchandise from certain retailers. I wish I was better.

As it stands, you end your Best Buy transaction by saying NO, NO, and NO. They might consider ways to let people leave with the word “yes” fresh on their lips.

Lileks has a few more things to say about customer service:

Lesson: from Best Buy to Marshall Field’s, it’s the same problem. One day a company is responsive, quick, savvy. Then one day it’s one percent bigger than it was before, and something happens. They’re the IRS. They’re the Pentagon. They’re an organization slowly ground into ruin by a thick busy level of managers, some of whom are in charge of extracting point-of-sale contact info, others who are going to make their bones on a store-wide phone-system overall. Elephants playing patty-cake.