Since I can’t resist anything negative about Best Buy, here is an article about how classify their customers (the original article is in the Wall Street Journal, but you have to have one of their super-expensive subscriptions to read it). Basically, Best Buy is testing a new strategy in some of their stores where they group customers into personality types, which allows them to ultimately ignore a certain segement (the “Devils”). The groups are:

Angels - buy new stuff not on sale, presumably with five-year warranties and $100 cables
Devils - use rebates, Best Buy’s price matching and other tricks while buying loss-leaders
Barrys - high-income men who like action movies
Jills - busy moms who can probably be talked into anything
Buzzes - early adopters who show off the latest gadgets

As the article mentions, it’s nothing new to label your customers and group them together, but only Best Buy wants to have their cake and eat it too. They want to sell cheap DVDs to get people into the store, but then they don’t want people to just buy the DVDs and then leave. They want to attract people to their store with rebates but then they don’t actually want people to successfully use those rebates. Luckily Best Buy offets this segementing with their awesome customer service.

Best Buy hopes to exorcize devil patrons [ars technica]