Barstool piles on Best Buy for Hard Factor Pat

The video going around is a dad in a parked car with his kid asleep in the back, explaining that nobody would listen to him. Big Cat's response was measured, as always.

Big Cat

@BarstoolBigCat

Hey @BestBuy fix this right now or I will have no choice but to skull fuck.

Pat “Beave” Cassidy 🦫 ( • )( • )@HardFactorPat

Security kicked me out of @BestBuy Bucktown today while I was trying to make a return. Totally erroneous and out of bounds. To the manager of Best Buy Bucktown who ordered my removal, I’d like a formal apology.

To be clear, nobody is literally skull-anything-ing a Best Buy. That is Big Cat doing what Barstool does best: finding a customer service grievance and backing it like a hostage situation. The store in question is the Bucktown location at 2100 N Elston Ave, and the stoolies have already found its public review page. A 1-star review posted on October 12 reads, in full: "Place sucks. Didn't let Pat return his broken TV. Kicked him out!" That is not journalism. That is a fan with a keyboard. But it shows how fast this went from one man's car rant to a coordinated Yelp-style raid on a big-box store.

The timing made it funnier. Pat's Best Buy saga landed the same week as Kelly Clarkson's fight with a Brooklyn curiosity shop. On October 10 Clarkson posted that staff at Art of Play brushed her off when she asked about Molly, a one-of-a-kind singing bird automaton. The store said Molly is fixed to the wall and was never for sale, and that an identical bird from the same artist goes for about $15,000. Kate said she couldn't handle 2 of these in 1 week, and PFT Commenter folded both stories into a single joke.

"Big mistake. Huge." is the Pretty Woman line, and Clarkson herself brought up Pretty Woman when she described being snubbed at the bird store. So PFT is treating Pat as the Kelly Clarkson of Elston Avenue, a man turned away by a store that didn't know who it was dealing with. To be clear, there was no bird and no puppet. The bird is pure PFT.

What actually happened at the counter is still a 1-sided story. Nothing on file shows Best Buy's version, and nothing says what was wrong with the TV or why the return got turned down. From the outside, all you can see is a guy in a car saying no one listened and the biggest accounts in the company getting behind him. That alone is a problem for a store that will now get tagged every time a Barstool employee has a bad day in Chicago.

Next up is whether Best Buy responds at all. Brands mostly stay silent on stuff like this, and when they don't, it usually ends with a gift card and a photo op. Art of Play answered Clarkson within a day and got a second news cycle out of it. Best Buy can make this go away or let Big Cat keep tagging them. Either way, Pat now has a story for the next Hard Factor episode.