Google Opens Real-World 'Google Shops' in Canada (digitaltrends.com)

Streetlight writes: Google is moving towards a physical presence in Best Buy stores...mimicking what Samsung has done. Hopefully the "stores" are staffed with competent professionals that know what they're selling and maybe provide some help to those who have purchased Google's hardware and software.
Google "is launching a store-within-a-store debuting in North America at select Best Buy locations in Canada," reports TechCrunch, adding that recently "Google also revealed that it would be creating a pop-up Experience Store for users to check out its new wares in New York City."

Comments

Disclaimer: May terminate account arbitrarily

[bigbang137]

Every Google product should come with a blackbox warning: your account with all its data may be terminated arbitrarily, basically whenever a Google executive throws a tantrum. Meanwhile, the company continues to evade taxes.

Maker's reps in the stores are a bad idea

[shanen]

Interesting in that I just had a recent experience along these lines. Around here most of the electronics shops are overrun with maker's reps, and it's a really bad idea. This example might be illustrative.

The maker was ASUS and the product was a dual-SIM Zenfone Go. Turned out to be useless for my specialized application, though I'm probably going to keep it as a backup for regular use. The ASUS reps were completely clueless about the problems, though it turned out the Huawei and Freetel reps knew exactly what was wrong.

My initial intention had been to buy a Huawei or Freetel, but that's where maker's reps in the stores distort things. Of course they are trying to latch onto the floating customers and direct (or misdirect) them to buying their employer's products.

My confusion is why the stores think they are saving money when they are actually destroying their own business. The reason you go to a multi-brand electronics store is to compare the various brands, hopefully with the support of a salesperson who knows all the brands and the differences between them. If you want to be bamboozled by a particular maker, you'd just go to the website and skip the store.

As for the google, I think their main business model these days is do-it-yourself brainwashing. They call it personalization, but what it really means is showing you what you want to see, including evidence of what you want to believe, no matter how misguided. Things that might offend you and drive you away from their ads are to be avoided at all costs, even at the cost of Trump's so-called victory.

Time for investment advice: You should buy the makers of anti-anxiety drugs and wife-beater t-shirts. For-profit prisons look hot, too. Plastics, smastics. You should have bought your google years ago. Invest in big poverty NOW.