Did the preorder from Best Buy for the book. Went super smoothly. Was rather surprised.
You had the total opposite experience from me.
I walked into my Best Buy about 5 minutes after they opened and went searching for the game on the shelves. I had a pre-order but the last few times I picked up my pre-order they just called someone to run back to the games department and grab one off of the shelf. I figured I'd get a jump on this process and pick one up off of the shelf. Plus, I didn't reserve a strategy guide and I wanted to pick one up.
Needless to say I found nothing on the shelves. They did have a Soulcalibur V stand but it had no games in it. I asked the cashier about my pre-order and she looked behind the counter in the place where they hold pre-orders. There was nothing. She buzzed another guy and he went into the back and grabbed a copy. He came back with the standard edition and no guide. I mentioned I had the collectors edition and I also wanted the collectors edition guide too. A few minutes later he comes back with the correct stuff.
As she is ringing stuff up I ask about the 15% off on the strategy guide and she's not sure but she thinks it will be applied automatically. She scans my reward card and gets my total. I asked if she got my $5 that I used for the pre-order and she did not. Thus, she had to run to the back again and find out how to apply this money. When she finally figured it out she had to redo the transaction again.
So for a second time the cashier starts to ring me up and she scans my reward zone card and gets my items entered correctly. The total was around $105.00 I gave her my $100 gift certificate (which I got from purchasing 5 titles during the fall/winter promotion) and she replies, "You cannot use this because the value of the items does not exceed $100.00" I HAD to purchase more than $100 worth items PRE-TAX to even use the card. This annoyed me but I went and got a copy of Last Remnant used for $15 and called it good.
I returned to checkout and the register was locked up so she had to ring it up on another one. This time she forgot to scan my reward zone card and when I presented it to her she said, "I would have to redo the transaction again to add this card. You can go online to get credit for this purchase." Since I had been there for 30 minutes I said screw it and decided not to make her redo everything.
When I get back to the office I went to enter the purchase and the damn Reward Zone site was down for maintenance. Unbelievable. Needless to say I'm not going to be pre-ordering anything from Best Buy in the future. The employees have no idea what they are doing.
P.S. They also screwed up my pre-order as I had FFXIII-2 and Mass Effect 3 on the same pre-order. Somehow they only took $5 from me and applied $2.50 to each game. This caused an issue when she redeemed my pre-order as it had to be at least $5. She mentioned it wouldn't cancel ME3 but that I would not have money for it. What a mess.
