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Bad PC Sales Staff Exposed
Barence writes "An undercover investigation has revealed how Dell's online sales staff take liberties with the truth when trying to sell customers new PCs. One member of staff told an undercover reporter that he would need a PC with a good graphics card to download digital photos. Another, who was more incompetent than devious, was asked how many photos could be stored on a 250GB hard disk. 'Its[sic] on average 2 MB then 1024 MB * 2,' came the bewildering reply. Meanwhile, a sales assistant at supermarket Tesco told the reporter that netbooks got their name because 'a Japanese man on a plane fell asleep with a laptop on his thighs and was horribly burned, so the industry has dropped the name laptop.'"
I was shopping for a new laptop for my wife a year or two ago and browsing Circuit City (no intentions of buying there, I just like to get my hands on the products before I buy them online). One of the "salesmen" asked me if I needed help and I decided to play along. I told him I was just checking out a few models for an upcoming purchase for my wife.
Him: Will you need a Microsoft to go with it?
Me: A Microsoft what? It comes with Windows Vista, doesn't it? Microsoft makes a lot of software.
Him: Will she need any office software?
Me: Yeah, but I've got a copy of Office XP (maybe it's 2003, I don't recall) I don't use anymore since I bought a Mac, so she'll just use that.
Him: Oh, no, you can't do that. Office XP won't work on this computer
Me: Huh? It should work fine, it's recent enough, Vista works with just about anything.
Him: Nope, Office XP/2003 doesn't work on Vista at all, you need Office 2007.
Me: Are you sure that it's not just that Office 2007 works better than the older versions on Vista?
Him: No, it's not going to work at all.
And then people wonder why sales dropped through the floor when they laid off their best staff.
The incompetence of the sales staff at Best Buy is not restricted to the computer department. Case in point: the other night I went to look for a cordless phone with a switching power supply - i.e. something that could run on either 110V or 220V.
Looking at the shelf of phones, none of the boxes gave any indication of input voltage or being dual-voltage capable. I asked a droid which of the phones would accept 220V and he said
"All of them."
"Are you sure? All of them?"
"Any of these will work."
I looked over the phones on display until I found one with a power brick attached. It clearly said Input: 110-120V AC.
"What about this one? It says 110V AC input."
He squinted at the brick and said
"No look. It says 250 here."
I looked where he was pointing and sure enough, it said Output: 250mW 12V DC. ..."
"Okay thanks. I think I'll do some research online or something and maybe come back in tomorrow with a specific model number in hand
If these guys can't master the simple concept of input and output voltages, there really is very little hope of them navigating the world of memory bandwidth, sockets, or video performance.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
I had to do something fairly similar for my grandmother's computer. Only problem was, the hard drive was working perfectly fine before she took it to Best Buy. I had given her a hand-me-down computer with Linux on it, and she wanted to install Windows on it. So she had to go buy a copy. Somehow in the process of installing Windows--an arduous task that involves the opening of the DVD drive--they had managed to open the case, unscrew the hard drive from the case, and then bust it up enough that it took over 24 hours for Windows to finish installing. I know this because they kindly provided my grandmother a receipt that had logs of everything they did, which I went over.
The best part is when they decided the slowness was due to the PC not having enough RAM for XP. Which is curious, because I had run XP on that PC just fine. So they tell her they need to buy 2 x 1 GB sticks. Eventually we managed to get a refund on all of that stuff after Windows failed to boot up.
After I had to head back to my home state, she was left with no computer and, even worse, no one who even remotely knows that they're talking about with computers. She went to the same Best Buy and asked for assistance on what computer to buy. They equipped her, someone whose most intensive task is copying photos off of a camera, with a quad core desktop with like 4 or 8 GB of RAM.
SSC
In 1999, I worked sales at PCs For Everyone, a (now-defunct, mostly) whitebox dealer in Cambridge, MA. They were a big operation, with a stellar reputation and good draw. People would drive for hundreds of miles to get a PCsFE system. As New England's largest whitebox dealer, they had about 15 guys in the back room assembling computers on any given day, and the burn-in racks were usually backlogged. We were always busy - when we weren't selling systems we were selling parts, and we got so packed on the weekends that there was a numbered ticketing system for counter help. I worked my ass off there 5 and a half days a week (the mandatory sales meeting was on my day off) and brought in, by my own conservative estimate, about $2M in gross sales during my year working for them. You wouldn't believe how many Celeron A 300's we went through. Those things went out the door like you could get high by smoking them.
I know a lot about personal computer internals. I knew even more back then. I spent at least an hour every night reading up on Anandtech and Tom's Hardware, and the other big hardware sites of 10 years back. I helped set up the demos, and I never sold anyone more computer than I thought they could reasonably need. I did product research, recommended new kit for us to sell, and did basic troubleshooting with customers, spending 1:1 time. I had a base of dedicated customers who would wait for me rather than deal with another salesman.
When stumped, other sales reps would come to me for answers much of the time. In short, if I haven't tooted my own horn enough, I was the goddamn bomb when it came to selling computers and parts.
In that year, I made a little over $22,000, and was shafted out of my bonus . I was gone on day 380, off to a job that paid 3 times as much that I got through a customer.
Taking away for a minute from the fact that my boss / the owner was a crook (and he was), even when shafting me that hard, here's the thing: I brought in $2M to a business myself, and that business 2 years later wasjust an online storefront.
There is no margin in computer sales. Even with a locally-respected brand name that drew customers from out-of-state, even when the owner was as crooked as Quasimodo's back, even when bringing in gross revenues in the tens of millions, the storefront was gone inside of a few years.
The reason PC sales sucks is because the margins are 0. The average PC salesman doesn't make dick unless he's selling in enterprise volumes, and you're lucky if they've even taken an A+ course. Anyone who genuinely enjoys both computers and sales quickly moves into sales engineering, or finds another lateral move that will net some income. The margins on each part are nil, the margins on systems are nil. CompUSA is gone because the margins were too slim. The Best Buy rep and the Dell consumer reps are incompetent because they're given 2 days with a 3-ring binder of training, then set loose on the floor. Like it or not, qualified sales staff costs money, and anyone with the know-how to be an effective salesperson with computers is going to chase the dollar out of that basement as soon as possible.
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
my husband works with a man that used to work for geek squad. He was fired after reporting that fellow geek's were stealing memory and hardware from unsuspecting clients. According to his departure paper, he was fired for not being a team player. Best buy and the geek squad are a bunch of thieves.
Years ago when I talked to them they proudly claimed they did not work on commission. However, every item had a 'point value' assigned to it, and if you reached certain tiers of points sold you would get a bonus added to your check. So since it was not a direct commission they could advertise that way to drag more people in thinking that their employees would be good honest folk since they weren't commission based sales.
I was trying to buy the sale of the week hard drive once and they were taking AGES to help me because they had people looking at computers. I watched one rep sell an elderly couple a high dollar gaming rig so they could email their child who was doing missionary work abroad. He ran off to get the paperwork for them to sign and I walked up, walked them all the way down to the other end of the display and pointed out a machine that was $1500 less. They were VERY happy. The associates, when they could finally be bothered to help me, got the drive and walked me to the front of the store like a criminal. I would have left, but the drive was a really good deal, and I was feeling pretty good about screwing them on the $1500 for being assholes.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.