Consumerist: “A Best Buy employee emailed us on April 4, 2007 to confess to the type of behavior mentioned in the lawsuit. He claims that techniques for tricking customer into signing up for subscriptions (such as MSN) were taught to him by a manager and encouraged by Best Buy.”

Virtually all American consumer electronics chains, national ISPs, telephone companies, credit card companies, and cable companies use Econ 101 management. Instead of having smart people figure out how to train their frontline customer service workers to serve customers well and profitably, they make up metrics that sound good and let the low wage, high-turnover customer service people come up with their own systems, which, inevitably, involve scamming customers and ripping them off.