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Computer Buying Experiences at B&M Stores
bob gnosh writes "The team over at [H] Consumer go into Best Buy, Fry's, CompUSA, and Circuit City and buy a computer at each store. They relate exactly what happened at each store, talk about warranties, and what to do to protect yourself or your friends when buying at these places." From the article: "Navigating these retail stores isn't for the faint of heart or those not armed with the right knowledge beforehand. As much as you'd like to go to your closest strip mall, have a salesperson discern your hardware needs, and walk out with a shiny new computer that does everything but load your dishwasher, such an experience is just not going to happen. Most retail sales people are simply not going to possess the necessary knowledge to correctly recommend or explain every nuance of a piece of hardware."
As a geek, who sometimes doesn't have a life, one of my favorite pasttimes is to pull aside customers and explain to them the amount of bullsh*t that the salesperson just fed them. It's actually quite a lot of fun.
My experience though is that best buy has a comparably small amount of BS. Circuit city certainly has more, but the worse is at the small mom-pop shops. These little places are TERRIBLE! They can't compete on price, so they stay in business by selling old hardware at inflated prices. They must hire used car salesmen to push 2 year old hardware. Buyer beware.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
Most retail sales people are simply not going to possess the necessary knowledge to correctly recommend or explain every nuance of a piece of hardware.
Yup, and this isn't just true of computers.
Circuit City sells audio equipment, for example. How many salesmen there know the first thing about any of it? My experience has been zero.
Try asking someone in a Wal-Mart a question about their bicycles.
The replacement of speciality stores with larger, general-purpose stores has, in my opinion, vastly reduced the amount of domain knowledge that the salesmen offer. Of course, it costs more to have salesmen with domain knowledge, and general-purpose stores pass on much of those savings to you, so it's a tradeoff...
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
I used to work at Staples during College. They didn't care how many computers, laptops, printers, etc. I sold ... all they cared about was warranties. Honest to gosh, and it really pissed me off, everytime a computer, laptop, or printer walked out of the store without a warranty, my on-floor manager would walk over and give me a lecture ... trying to tell me how to better pitch the warranty so that it wouldn't happen again. I even had one on-floor manager who told me I should never let a customer leave without a warranty ... tell them whatever it takes ... tell them the pc won't last, whatever ... just don't let them leave without that warranty.
I can't speak for CompUSA (though it's unlikely) but Circuit City hasn't had comissioned employees since the first month of 2002, and Best Buy never has. There are minimum quotas everyone is expected to meet (otherwise, how can you tell if they're doing their job or not?) but you'll find that just about anywhere.
The "printable" link, text is all in one page and no ads:
= MTAzOQ==
/too/ hard on the employee who mentions it to you, their job is on the line.
http://consumer.hardocp.com/articleprint.html?art
On another note, I used to work at Best Buy. I really needed a job at the time and couldn't find work anywhere else. I certainly know my stuff about computer hardware and software, so did a few other employees. One was even a computer science major fresh out of university just waiting for a real job opportunity to come by. Of course, a few employees knew absolutely nothing. So it's sort of a mixed bag, you could get lucky and find an honest and knowledgeable salesperson or you could get someone who knows nothing about computers and just wants to sell you an extended warranty.
On that note, stores are given a quota of extended warranty sales per day (usually they want 10% of profits to be extended warranty. Extended warranties are a major cash cow for these stores. Thus, employees (especially computer and home theatre) are told to promote the extended warranty and go through the checklist of it's features to EVERY customer, even if they flat out refuse upon first mention. So try not to go
My recommendation: buy online, avoid the sales pitch, do the research yourself.
Ha! I love it! I work at a major store as a big-shot manager type, and I found this article interesting for a number of reasons. What the article describes is a very common problem. The people who truly know about these computers are not working in retail. So, you try to hire people who sound like they know what they're doing and sometimes train them on the rest. The stores with the best trained staff consistantly outperform poorly trained stores. A lack of training often implies a cost leader strategy by the company, and cost leaders rarely outperform quality leaders' profit margins. However, cost leaders can make more profit by volume. Best Buy, in particular, has isolated those who truly understand computers and created a "Geek Squad" that does not spend much time on the sales floor. They want the knowledgable staff to work on the higher margin tech support tasks rather than the low margin sales track. Geeks tend to be better geeks than salespeople.
P.S. Commissioned sales staff tend to make a LOT more money than non-commission. Personal shoppers often work on commission, and their higher payrate gives them more weight to fight for you (the customer) when going through beauracracy or other paperwork functions.
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Hint: if your kid isn't well behaved or routinely cries in stores; leave him at home. On a busy weekend, the last person that a salesperson is going to offer to help is the guy holding a crying brat.
The flip-side to this is that it tends to create an opening for a service-only business. After it became impossible to build computers for a profit, I found a niche recommending Dells and helping small businesses setup their computer, network it, and maintain software.
There is definitely a market for smart helpful people, but I find that most people smart enough to help don't have the patience or interest in doing it.
Secondly they move people around the store regardless of their knowledge. I wanted to go to the Geek Squad because i did know my way around the inside of a computer and the software. Again, many of the people hired up there didn't know to much. Some were meant only to run half automated "diagnostic" programs and install software. Only a few of us back there actually could fix a computer.
Due to little hours, i was "forced" to go work in a different dept. I was put in Digital Imaging. This was not one of my more knowledgable area. The only reason i was there was to pay my bills. Thanks to a sparked interest in the area and lots of external research, i do know a lot more than most of the other employees in that area.
Best Buy does not offer adequate training to its employees. The training provided is in the form of a online articles and quizzes. Although these are mandatory, they are easily skipped through. Also the articles for computer and cameras are generally outdated to the current hardware on the shelf. This is the only form of technical knowledge training given.
Another thing to consider is that the majority of people coming in to buy a computer have little or no technical knowledge. When asked a question such as "what is hyperthreading?" Most, including myself, resort to a very simple non-technical answer as to not confuse the customer. This is adequate for 90% of the customers. The other 10% first see you as someone without a large amount of computer knowledge. When i can identify the person with a higher knowledge of computers, i tend to use more technical terms and more indepth explainations. Also i do understand that the majority of people at best buy do not have the knowledge for more technical terms and explainations.
As a college student, this is only a job to pay the bills. Most knowledgable people in my store are the same way. The ones that actually know what they're talking about don't usually stick around that long. Just enough to get through school or land a good internship/co-op. All of these reasons would contribute to why many sales associates don't have much computer know-how.
I applaud the amount of effort the author(s) put into this research. I especially found their summary of warrantees a useful bullet.
;-). Yes, this is very anecdotal, but I tell this story to illustrate that nitpicking the salesforce at a B&M store is useless. In fact, unless you go to a specialty store, ANY GENERIC RETAIL SALESFORCE IS CLUELESS! This holds for kitchen appliances (Target), or power tools (Home Depot), bicycles, televisions, etc. I re-realized this when I was shopping for a table saw: The Home Depot doesn't know shit, they sell volume; but the Contracter Tool Supply store spent two hours with two staff members teaching me everything, in explicit detail.
However, I think they approached this as if they were grading the marketing propaganda. What I mean is this: they zeroed in on specifics, marketing specifics: 64 vs 32 bit, Vista, video cards for games, memory upgrades. Asking these sorts of questions is testing to see how well the salespeople know the marketing icons, and if they are gamers.
This is useless: no human being can explain how this marketing BS translates to real-world usage to a newbie in a 30 minute sales session, and no non-newbie is going to ask these questions.
I worked in retail for about a decade and went to many sales conferences. One thing I learned is: it's all about price point. Everyone has a threshold they are willing to spend, and the sales/marketing force tries to push them as high as possible. In my experience in bicycle retail, ~80% of the customers would be more than satisfied with anything at their price point. Pushing them to the next price point serves no one but the salesperson (my commission!).
In my recent experience recommending a computer to a seriously NON TECHIE people, I've found the same is true. Most of these folk were ready to fork over up to $1,000 (thinking there were no machines $1000). I've recommended this approach for 7 or 8 people, two were relatives. Basically, pick the best warantee and buy the machine at your price point.
100% were happy (3/4 bought a DELLs, 1/4 bought an candy-colored iMac
If you really want to be educated, go to a store that specializes in only what you want to buy. Don't rely on generic high-volume retail malls to give you any real information.
I think that is the real conclusion of this B&M research.
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There's a far cry between 5% comission on a $400,000 house and what the agent actually takes home. Half will go to the agency. There are few agents who still get both ends of the sale today. Most agents now represent a buyer or a seller but rarely both. Commission will be split evenly between buyers and sellers agent. So now the agent actually gets 1.25% of the sale or about $5000 out of which they deduct health insurance, SEP/IRA, license fees, membership dues, TAXES, gasoline, office supplies, dry cleaning, cellphone and in some cases, rent on their desk and phone at the agency. That's why there is a high turnover, 80% of all agents quit in their first year. Those who don't are still working another job for at least 5 years or have another income in the family. Smart folks may be attracted to a quarter of the $20,000 commission but the competition in the market place is such that many only sell 3 or less properties in a year. The few at the top who do well have been in the market place long enough to gain repeat business or very favorable word of mouth and other press. For the stress and irregular hours many would actually do better at $8 an hour wearing a blue shirt.
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I work at Best Buy in the Geek Squad, and as far as I can tell, most machines we get when we open the box (for a functionality check) don't have install media. They either have a restore partition, or bug you on first startup to make DVDs. I've always thought that when I'm testing it out (I can't do the media burn unless the customer pays for that), and I click "not right now", it would ask again, and AFAIK, thats SOP - and we may be wrong on that...
If they just don't have media, they come sealed in the box without it - we aren't taking it out at my store.
I'm guessing what is happening is a combination of manufactuers *not* sending reinstall media, and customers either
a) not making it at startup for whatever reason - they don't understand, don't care, or we said ask later and the program never asks later (got to check on that one)
b) no option to make disks, manufacturer only provides partition (really bad if the HD goes, but I've seen this setup on some machines we sell).
The Geek Squad doesn't charge "more" (per SOP and where I work) if you don't have install discs, we just insist that you have legal install media - we don't care where/how you get them. Our fee to install an OS is the same in any situation.
The other confusion may be our modular fee structure (or maybe confusing). We bill per service, but it may be badly broken up, IDK.
There is the HD cost if you are doing COD. Then there is our install fee for the HD - $39 for a desktop, $59 for a laptop IIRC. Finally, it's $59 to install an OS, but again, *you* MUST provide legal install media. We can sell you a boxed XP copy first if need be.
If you have a PSP, the whole thing is covered under that, except you still have to provide legal install media. Due to what I think is beuracratic issues (could be legal, contractual, or just coporate is lazy) we cannot obtain restore discs from the manufacturers for you, the customer has to do that. Some manufacturers charge for restore discs, I've seen quotes from $20-$90 so that may also be the issue, but that clearly IS NOT going to Best Buy.
What we CAN NOT do is pull a CD from the back, slap in your install code and go to town, Activation, and probably legal issues make this a non-starter. This is a PITA all around, and I wish it wasn't so, but those are the rules.
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