How much does geek squad cost in 2024? And why the terrible service?

Not sure if this goes here, if it doesn’t please point me to where it should go.

Anyways, with all the recent upset with Best Buy and people posting their stories, i’ll post mine that happened recently here which stands as a testament of why you should be wary of the Geek Squad.

Last year I bought a laptop for college, I then bought the Geek Squad Black Tie protection on it as they would fix anything I had issues with over the next 3 years. A week after this, I bought a seperate hard drive and installed it alongside the HDD that came stock (it has 2 HDD Bays)

So anyways, fast forward a year and after it’s first year of use it got sent back to the Geek Squad to repair a sound card issue and a few other minor problems.

I send it in, get a call saying one of my HDDs is bad and needs to be replaced (odd) so I ask which one, they confirm it was the stock one that comes with the laptop, not the aftermarket. So I give them permission to remove THAT one.

Once I received my laptop, upon bootup, I noticed they uninstalled my Windows 8, odd because the OS was on my personal HDD. Upon looking at the drives, I had a C drive with 373GB of storage, and a D Drive with 350GB of storage. (I had a 1TB and a 750GB before) so I check disk management and find out that I only had one HDD partitioned to look like I had 2 of them.

Off to Best Buy we go, I wait my turn patiently, go up to the counter and say that I received my laptop after repair and my personal hard drive was missing from the computer. The employee’s response? “What do you want me to do about it”, we had to get the supervisor over and went through the entire scenario, they told us to check back in 3 days.

5 days down the road I get a call from Best Buy, the person said “So you want the data recovery on this hard drive right?”, completely annoyed by now, I exclaimed “NO! I WANT MY HARD DRIVE BACK”, they claimed it was against company policy, so I had to explain I never gave them permission to remove that hard drive. After that, I got the “Oh…. we are going to have to look into this” message, and 5 days later again I get the phone call saying they screwed up and are now shipping the hard drive to the store where I could pick it up.

Finally after 2.5 weeks I received my personal hard drive.

I would give them the benefit of the doubt but then why was my remaining hard drive partitioned to look like 2 hard drives? That leads me to believe they screwed up / attempted to steal it, and tried to cover their tracks. Imagine how many more people are victim of these scenarios and just aren’t able to recognize this? A missing gig of ram, who will notice, understand what i’m getting at here. Even if it weren’t stolen, it is possible that components might go missing through negligence which is possibly what happened and someone who isn’t tech savvy would never notice.

Anyways, I hope my story makes people worry about their computer with best buy, and that they will always check to make sure they aren’t being screwed over.