The "worst" place to preorder from is Best Buy.
I strongly recommend that you stay away from Best Buy and avoid giving them your business for videogames or electronics. I purchased a $400 insurance policy on my HDTV set, and Best Buy refuses to honor it. Best Buy constantly tells people "These problems are within 'Acceptable Tolerances.'" I talked to other stores and I was told that they would instantly replace a product with that type of problem. I found out that there are over 40,000 complaints against Best Buy with the Better Business Bureua. And there are currently five states who have Attorney Generals seeking legal action against Best Buy for refusing to honor warranties and refusing to honor insurance. There is even a Senator from Connecticut who is seeking legal action against Best Buy because the Best Buy organization does not honor warranties and insurance.
And if you don't buy insurance from a Best Buy product, but your product requires service, you better get ready to pay an insanely inflated price! For example, my HDTV set cost $1800. When the Geek Squad from Best Buy came to my home, they claimed it would be $3200 to order a part and install it in the HDTV. Obviously, that was absolutely disgusting to hear information like that. Hearing that reminded me of when I heard Best Buy employees in the store telling people "It isn't a good idea to buy cheap $5 HDMI cables online; it is better to pay the $80 for our brand in the store." I have a friend who works for Best Buy and he gets everything for the discount of "cost plus five percent." The HDMI cables that Best Buy sells for $80 can be purchased by my friend for $5.25. In other words, even though Best Buy charges $80 for their HDMI cables, it costs them only $5, just like if you bought them on Amazon or some other website.
As far as the Xbox 360 goes, I can tell you that Best Buy is a place to stay away from. When you buy their expensive insurance policy on the Xbox 360, you are now forced to send in your Hard Drive as part of the transaction in order to get your money back or to have your unit replaced! My console had a problem other than the RROD, so I needed to use the insurance policy. I wanted to keep my hard drive, because it had all my files saved on it. But Best Buy would not allow this. I asked to speak to different Supervisors and Managers, but best buy would not do anything to help me out. There were even three separate times when Best Buy claimed a Manager would call me within two to three business days, but I never once received a call from Best Buy.I needed to spend $30 on a 512MB Memory Unit and spend three hours transferring all my saved files, one at a time, from the Hard Drive to the Memory Unit. That sucked!
Let the buyer beware! Stay away from Best Buy!
The online retailers I have had really good experiences with in terms of shipping with orders and preorders are:
* Amazon: They ship items quickly and on time for both orders and preorders. I recently preordered Forza Motorsport 3. It was shipped the day the game was released, and I received it just two business dayslater with free shipping. If shipping is important to you, I believe you can pay extra to get the item shipped even faster.
* K-Mart: I once ordered The Genesis Hits game with all those classic Sega Genesis games on one Xbox 360 disc. The game arrived at my home the very next day! This was amazing to me! I think the reason this might have happened is because I placed my order really late at night, which essentially made it about 1.5 days. Still, this was really fast!
* Meijer: I recently ordered a digital camera from Meijer, and it arrived at my home in two business days. This was very fast and I was very pleased.
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