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Gateway To Close All Retail Stores
John Lazzaro writes "Looks like Gateway is throwing in the towel and closing all of its remaining retail stores, according to a Reuters/Yahoo! report." The story notes: "Gateway's stores, which will be closed on April 9, have long been criticized by analysts and investors as an expensive drag on cash flow because of lease costs and the difficulty of managing inventories", and goes on to suggest: "...with [the acquisition of] eMachines, Gateway doesn't necessarily need the added distribution channel the stores gave the company. In addition to selling Gateway's wares over the phone and via the Internet, eMachines PCs are sold at major retailers such as Best Buy."
They need the resources to open stores in India. All the people they're paying to do tech support need somewhere to buy computers.
If their decision to fire me last month had anything to do with this...
The Gateway Store was mainly a "showroom" environment because Gateway's main product is a made-to-order PC. Gateway could never get into a Best Buy or Circuit City environment because they didn't want to cheapen their customizable image by providing computers that would sit on shelves. Meanwhile, eMachines is the sit-on-the-shelf cheap PC that you can find at Best Buy and Circuit City along with discount environments such as Wal-Mart.
Shutting down the stores is more or less a nod to the retail chains that they can have eMachines all to themselves, and there's no danger of having to compete with eMachines coming out of a Gateway Country store. Even if those eMachines PCs had a "Gateway" sticker on them, it'd still be just as bad to the retailers... they don't like suppliers who are trying to undercut them by operating their own retail stores.
This is one of the forces that limits Apple's distribution. Apple choses to sell mostly directly and therefore they aren't making much of a push to get themselves into major retail chains... Since Wal-Mart can't undercut Apple's prices, Wal-Mart's not particularly interested in having Apple.
So, there's a nice firm wall going up at Gateway. Made-to-order PCs will be ordered by phone or Internet and be stamped Gateway, mass-made machines will be in retail stores and called eMachines. Everybody should be happy...
People getting fired in an already bad economy isn't funny
I hear ya on the bad experiences w/ Gateway. Back around early 1995, I ran the computer systems for a college book store. We bought a Gateway 386 to run Office and a VBA based app that I wrote for the managers to input the register tapes into, which would do all the department breakdowns, and associated work, and fax a report to headquarters.
;)
Problem was, this machine couldn't run Windows 3.1 in 386 Enhanced mode. I had had a similar problem with a computer that I owned, and knew that this had to do with a faulty keyboard controller or circuits associated with it. Address Line 20 on the keyboard controller was actually used to switch between Protected and Enhanced mode on the 386. I related this information to Gateway tech support, and recieved incredulous reactions, assurances that such a thing was impossible, and no help whatsoever.
Shortly after the warrenty ran out, Gateway admitted that there was a fault in the keyboard controller that was causing our problem. They refused to make good, even though I had given them the answer months before, and insisted on charging for the motherboard swap. My boss at the time was not particularly clueful about these things, and declined to press the matter.
I, being a student at the time had to console myself with informing the manager of Gateway Customer service that "as long as I live, Gateway will never see another fucking cent from any person or company who comes to me for advice on computers. Enjoy that $200 fee, because it's going to cost you tens of thousands of dollars in lost sales" (and has).
Some grudges are worth holding
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
I work tech support for Gateway. Trust me those computers are verified crap. They put the worst, cheapest parts in all of the systems I've seen.
My favorite is the guy who called up with a Gateway computer that had 768 MB Ram, a Radeon 9600, and RAID 0 in it. Which is all fine, except the power supply was 250 Watts!!! Needless to say this guy had tons of problems with his computer from day 1.
023AD01("Child", "Evil");