Last weekend was a blast. Among other things, my friend Steve was able to use his tax refund to buy a new laptop, which he sorely needed thanks to the infernal bit rot that plagues Vista (and most every other MS operating system). I was as excited as Steve was, no doubt, because I planned to put Linux on his old laptop and wow him with how his “useless old laptop” would instantly become “good as new” and completely usable again.
But first things first. We headed off to Best Buy. Had he been considering a desktop, I might have tried to get him into Fry’s, so we could consider building it ourselves, which can be fun, though these days it is not always so likely to actually save any money, and might cost more. Since it was a laptop he wanted, I generally recognize that your Best Buys, Circuit Citys, etc tend to do better on the price points there. Equipped with a rough idea of what it was going to cost on dell.com, off we ventured.
To our great surprise, Best Buy had Dell handily beat (for the rough specs we were looking at, by about 200$, not counting shipping). We did our thing, looking back and forth between the lumbering desktop replacement choices (or, as we used to call them back when I worked at Circuit City, the “aircraft carriers”). I of course provided my technical opinions when warranted and occasionally when not. Is DDR3 worth it? Nah, not for your needs. What about this one? The screen is bigger over here, blah blah, etcetera etcetera.
What really shocked me about the whole thing was Steve’s priorities. Despite all the times I had tried to “put myself in the customer’s shoes”, I had never really succeeded to the degree I did today, since I *was* the customer. I realized that my needs are so different from his. Steve spends every moment staring at the screen. He will never plug it into an external monitor, except *maybe* to watch a movie on his TV. He will never run research computing and is unlikely to play a demanding game, most will be such that any modern computer in that store would handle them readily. DDR3 should not really be important to him. Nor should a 7200RPM hard drive (sure, it’s nice, but not worth paying extra for). Laptops today come with 4GB of ram. 4 Gigabytes!!!! That’s windows for ya. My desktop has 4GB of ram and I haven’t had programs using over a gig or two in as long as I can remember. With Linux, it’s like I have a 2GB L4 cache all the time, it’s pretty hot. Anyways, Steve found himself deciding between 4, 6, or 8GB of ram. Can you imagine? Most software these days can’t even address more than 3-4GB due to the 32-bit thing (which is *still* a problem in the non-Linux world).
After asking a few “sales drones” for some generic stats not obvious from the store tags, they got the distinct impression I knew way more about their products than they did, and as most sales drones would do in such a situation, started to steer clear of me. One guy, however, knew his stuff pretty well, and after we started to look “ready to go”, he took the plunge and started chatting with us. We had a really nice conversation, wherein he confirmed my beliefs that almost nothing has changed about electronics retail since the 6 years ago when I last worked it.
Now you folks might want to sit back and take a deep breath, lest you risk under appreciating the value of the insight I am about to provide. Electronics retail is HELL. Absolute hell. Nobody should suffer such seemingly eternal, unquestionably infernal torment. But I did so, and survived, so that I might pass on the valuable knowledge I gained there. Customers…are not right. They are wrong. Only in electronics retail is this true, and computer retail specifically. Why this reversal of otherwise-certain time-worn truth? Because you don’t *want* the customer to buy your product. Most stores LOOSE money on computer sales. I recall in particular at Circuit City, we had laptops which cost $1350 for which our cost was $1335. Take into account keeping the lights on, paying me to sell the thing, and the warehouse guy to drag it down off the shelf, and the cashier to ring it up, and you’ve got a problem. Some were even sold UNDER cost. The absolute most we ever made on a laptop was *maybe* $200, and that was for a $3700 laptop, the most expensive we ever carried (it was one of the Toshiba “aircraft carriers”). Rather than being in “sales”, I was actually in “damage control”.
My job was to sell warranty, and accessories, “like my life depended on it”. At any point in time, I was to recommend any and all accessories I could possibly imagine the customer needed. I honestly recall saying at least once “do you need a TV with that?”. Here is an example of my normal “checklist” I might run through:
- Warranty
- Computer
- Monitor
- Printer
- Paper
- Ink
- Printer Cable
- Thumb drive(s)
- Blank CDs/DVDs
- Movies to watch on it
- Extra USB cable
- USB extension cable
- Ethernet cable
- Extra software (ms office)
- Internet Service (3 year contract! lol…)
- Laptop carrying case
- Laptop security lock
- Extra keyboard/mouse for travel
- Extra Battery
- Extra charging cord/car adapter
This is just off the top of my head, 6 years later. A sale “done right” could take in excess of 2 hours.
So, given what I have said above, you can imagine, I was quite prepared when our guy started on the warranty speech. He did a really good job. Frankly, 8/10 for examples, 7/10 for cost benefit analysis, 10/10 for confidence. Also, 10/10 for getting his manager involved, which he did very subtly. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought his manager just happened to be hanging around and overheard us, but of course, that isn’t true. He probably gave him the “heads up” while he was “checking to make sure it was in stock” a few minutes earlier “I think I’m gonna need a hand with this one – he really knows his stuff!”. I was so proud of Steve, he said “no warranty” and didn’t back down even after they both ganged up on him. I’ve seen an awful lot of people crush under the same situation – since I was so often one of the people on the other side, trading comments back and forth with my manager about how smart it is to buy the warranty, and how it pays for itself when the battery dies, which it almost certainly will within the 2 year warranty period.
Anyways, to my great surprise, after the warranty talk was over, we did not get some big huge accessories talk. I have to admit – this was a missed opportunity. I was especially surprised that the manager was there and didn’t even suggest a carrying case or anything like that. We *probably* wouldn’t have bought anything, but what was the harm in asking, once you’ve already got the laptop rung up and everything? Meh, I’m glad we didn’t have to mess with it. Despite that “missed opportunity”, my otherwise accurate prediction of basically the entire progress of the sale and almost word for word the exchange between Steve, the sales guy, and the manager, I am convinced that very little has changed in the world of electronics retail.
That said, I’m glad we got the sales guy we did. He did everything he had to do, and was a nice guy about it. He never seemed pushy (beyond the minimum amount of pushy you need to be in order to work at that job). He knew his stuff and was a nice guy and I’d buy from him again if I ever bought computers from Best Buy for myself instead of building them.
Steve is obviously pleased with his new laptop as we hang out and get it set up from the comfort of Capitol HIll’s Six Arms Pub.