Tech Support Businesses on the Rise

prostoalex writes "People are relying on more technology that ever before, and tech support geek squads are on the rise, media reports. The USA Today article says Best Buy has hired 1,500 more technicians for its Geek Squad and CompUSA currently keeps its tech support ranks at 12,000. The article from Digital Connect magazine talks about Geeks On Call, a nationwide tech support franchise, which has more than 300 shops in 20 states. The USA Today article states the profit margins for the tech support teams generally run within 30%, while the Digital Connect magazine gives an estimate on prices charged to achieve the margins: "An initial diagnostics call, for example, could run $99. Cleanup jobs usually run one to two hours, and some franchisees say they charge between $149 and $165 for one hour and $265 to $275 for two hours.""

Comments

What?

[2names]

for that kind of money, just buy a new PC. You can get one for under $300 now.

Through a non-geeks eyes...

[Shoten]

I've read several posts now, asking "Why not just buy a new computer instead of paying the money for 3 hours of repairs?" I can answer that in one word: DATA.

That new computer won't have the pictures of their child's first birthday, or their honeymoon, which were moved onto the old computer from their digital camera. It won't have the files for Quicken, last year's TurboTax data, or the large MP3 collection. The new computer won't have their email, their resume, or anything else they may have worked on (but not backed up).

Yes, I know, they could just move the data over...well, not necessarily. I helped someone out once, and the computer was SO blown up with spyware that it was actually quite hard to get the data off. The guy had been using spyware-riddled apps of various sorts for so long, and waited so long to do something about the problem, that his system was barely stable enough to stay up, much less transfer data to another PC. He couldn't burn CDs, either. And this is the 'new computer' scenario.

I think a lot of people put up with a good bit of cruft on their systems; by the time they're calling for multi-hundred-dollar support, things have gotten so bad that it's not simple to just step off to another computer and move the data.