entry!

I recently helped a friend buy a 1080p LCD from Best Buy in Rhode Island. The customer rep argued with me for about 10 min about how important buying an $50 Monster HDMI cable was, even going as far as to say "look, if you want her to throw her money away buying a nice TV and getting a crappy signal, that's fine, the customer is always right."

At one point he brought me over to a setup to show me the terrible "color banding" I was to expect with a crappy HDMI cable. He loaded up the title screen on Planet Earth, and pointed at the gradient from blue to black above the title. I asked him to show me the same DVD on that TV with a "high quality" HDMI cable. I got something like "Oh, I can't tear apart this hookup to show you that, the wires are running though the walls".

"We contacted Target about this story. A spokesperson told us the store is taking this situation very seriously, and they plan to look into how it could have happened."

I currently work in electronics at my local Target, it's really simple how it happened:
When an electronic item is returned to Target with the receipt and the guest returning it states there is nothing wrong with it a team member coving electronics is called down to guest service to inspect the item. Except we are not supplied the equipment to format the card, so as long as the card appears to be in a working state, and the packaging and documentation are in a resellable condition, we give the thumbs up and the item is returned. At that point the item is sorted into "reshop" and sent back to electronics to be restocked.
The funny thing is if the card isn't in resellable condition it gets "charged back", which pretty much means if it's not broken it's passed on to the local discount store (porn included).