BestBuy Totaltech membership is a total disaster
BestBuy made an “NFT move” in a retailer space.
Bestbuy Totaltech membership, Source: BestBuy
By introducing its $200/y premium membership program called Totaltech, customers have access to a special protection program, 24/7 tech support, or even AppleCore+ service (which on its own is quite expensive). However, Totaltech also brings access to “exclusive Totaltech member prices”.
BestBuy is an exclusive reseller of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Founders Edition cards in the US. For this reason, by putting a new shipment of graphics cards exclusively for Totaltech members, NVIDIA Founders Edition cards should now technically have a new MSRP, because yesterday Totaltech membership was required for purchase.
In fact, the program was never intended to fix a problem of availability, nor to fight scalpers. Customers were allowed to buy multiple cards as long as they were not the same models. In the end, some people bought as many as 7 different cards, including custom editions. One would find it hard to believe that even after 2 years of inflated GPU pricing, anyone needs 7 cards right now.
Scalpers buying multiple cards thanks to BestBuy TotalTech membership, Source: Reddit
Although this deal could have just been a membership program launch event and BestBuy will still offer FE cards to customers without membership, there is a great risk that this will severely limit access to these cards in the US.
Hopefully, no other retailer selling GeForce and Radeon GPUs will think of a similar membership program after seeing such screenshots. In any other case, we will make sure to expose their greed and lack of sympathy for gamers struggling to find a card at MSRP.
Source: BestBuy, Tom’sHardware, ArsTechnika, Reddit
