I worked at a Best Buy part-time for about six months ten years ago to save up money to pay for my wedding. I worked on the computer sales floor.

I saw some pretty heinous things take place there. Not so much evil in order to make more money, but just completely callous because no one working there really gave a crap. It was hourly work, not on commission, and there were no career sales people there -- mostly just a bunch of part-timers working it as a second job.

But the thing that I really hated were the extended warranties. My only goal was to sell as many as I could.

When I interviewed, they asked me how I felt about warranties and if I was willing to sell them. I don't remember any other questions about my skills. Just about if I would sell their warranties.

A telling fact: when I worked there, the *only* sales statistic they tracked was how many extended warranties you sold. You could have sold $100,000 worth of computer equipment in a day (and I probably did that a couple of times), but if your name wasn't on X number of extended warranties, you got spoken to about it.

If a $6,000 computer package went out the door without a warranty going with it, you failed and they let you know about it. I often had the sales manager come back to computers and say, "A computer just left without a warranty. What happened?"

They didn't track anything else -- no sale except the warranty was ever traceable back to an individual sales person. They didn't care about anything else. You could be the greatest computer sales person in the world, but if you didn't sell an good ratio of warranties with the computers you sold, you could lose your job.

The only sales contests they ever had were based on warranty sales. On a busy Sunday, they sometimes offer some merchandise to the sales person who sold the most warranties.

In the break room was a big leader board for warranty sales. In fact, the only sales training I ever remember receiving was how to sell the warranties -- when to introduce it into the conversation, how to handle objections, etc.

If you're ever there on a busy Sunday (the sales circular came out on Sundays), listen for an long announcement over the intercom every once in a while that goes something like this:

"Computers, you have a call on 44. Video, you have a call on 67. Appliances, you have a call on 89." etc.

No one has a call. This is actually the value of the extended warranties those departments have sold as a percentage of sales. So Computers was at 4.4% -- they were selling $4.40 in extended warranties for every $100 in merchandise, etc.

That's bad -- shortly after an announcement like that, the sales manager would likely come station himself in the department to see what was going on. Or head give you a "phone headset" to wear that was actually a wireless microphone back to an earpiece he wore so he could listen to your conversations with customers.

And why were they so obsessed? Because the warranties are a friggin' cash cow.

We got an employee discount of "cost plus five percent." So by checking the employee price of an item compared to the actual sales price, you could see how profitable various items where.

For instance, computers were often more expensive for an employee because the profit margin on a computer is only about 2% -- they're really tight. However, an employee could buy a $30 printer cable for about $7 because the margin on those was huge.

The employee price on extended warranties told the story: an employee could get a $200 extended warranty for about $11, proving that the profit margin on them is something like 2,000%.

That's good money, yo.