"Best Buy De-Hoses Washers To Save Money?"

According to alleged Best Buy insider, Best Buy is removing a previously included (and necessary) component in order to sell overpriced accessories.

Personally, I believe it. When I worked at Best Buy during law school, there was a conscious effort from Management to de-emphasize Epson Multifunction Printers, because they came with a USB cable in the box. Management hated selling them, because they couldn't then push their overpriced cables. I strongly suspect this type of pressure led to Epson's later removal of USB cables from their multifunctions.

It got really ridiculous when Best Buy employees told customers that they needed to buy gold plated USB cables if they were printing photos, or else the picture quality would suffer. I've seen it happen, and know others that were told the same thing. Don't try and pull this crap on an electrical engineer.

I don't know if these salesmen were intentionally misrepresenting the facts, or didn't know any better. It doesn't really matter. Shameless liars and ignorant fools both give bad electronics advice. Best Buy employs thousands of each.