I have been thinking about this, as I sure most of you all have and I have come to the following conclusions.
Best Buy's customers fall into a few different categories. Customers who shop on impulse/need, people who shop when they are bored, and people who shop smart.
If we break those down in terms of returns and price matching I would think it breaks down a little further.
1. People who buy things to try em out but with the intent on returning them, this new policy is aimed at them, but others are hit in the cross fire.
2. People who buy stuff without really thinking it through and end up regretting/disliking the product.
3. People who price match to save money.
Best Buy is reducing their overall return period to the lowest in the retail market, 15 days, just over 2 weeks.
As such the people who are #1 will just shop at Wal-Mart or Target who still have bigger windows, so Best Buy will be pushing those people away, I doubt Best Buy really cares about those people.
Then we have #2, those people return very few items, maybe 5-10% of all their purchases. Normal customers do this mainly because they either really like what they buy or just don't want to bother with the work involved in going back to the store and returning it and rather just suck it up and learn from it.
The people who buy something, find they just don't like it for whatever reason will go in to return the item. They will be denied due to the new stricter policy and more than likely will either stop shopping there all together or only buy what they know they will keep. Either way it will reduce the amount of income Best Buy gets from that demographic.
CAGs will just shop a lot smarter, instead of picking up a brand new game with the hope of getting it cheaper, I know I will not be doing that and will instead wait for a store to have it for the price I want and then go and buy it. Basically solving nothing except lowering their overall sales for an initial products release window leaving Best Buy with more product on the shelf and will then need to lower the price themselves to move it.
Again this is just my thoughts/theory on the matter. I just think it is going to back fire on them. I can understand where they are coming from, but why not just back it 30 day return and 15 day price match (all retailers) for normal customers. And then 30 days return and 30 day price match (all retailers) for Silver members.
Makes more sense to me on both sides, but I am not a business savvy person, I am just a CAG who wants companies to survive that deserve to survive *cough* unlike GameStop *cough* and the customer to get good deals.