Best Buy apparently forgot about the power of social media when they abruptly canceled hundreds of orders they originally accepted and promised in time for Christmas.

 They offered a lame apology, basically admitting they had accepted orders for more items than they actually had. This resulted in a firestorm erupting across the net as consumer sites, blogs, and the company’s own community forums and Facebook fan page were filled with angry posts. Some affected customers accused Best Buy of deleting posts in an effort to do some sort of damage control.

Experts are calling it a black eye for the company, and their apparent lack of caring that they pretty much screwed over a lot of people who suddenly don’t have the gifts they’d ordered due to the fact the company had an overall good holiday shopping season with sales up from last year. However, a screwed over customer tends to have a long memory and a big mouth, and they may wish they cared a little more when next year’s holiday season rolls around as the bad publicity may come back to haunt them.

Infuriated customers were quick to criticize the company’s tasteless holiday commercials, which depicted rather nasty women mocking and bullying Santa Claus as Best Buy employees commented that the wide variety of great gifts at low prices was giving him some stiff competition. I’m guessing they wish they hadn’t gone ahead with that campaign now!  They did offer affected customers a gift card as compensation, but has refused to honor the special Black Friday pricing once the items are back in stock and won’t deliver the gift card until after Christmas. This has fueled even more rage toward the company. The story has made its way around the net and thanks to that, around the world.