Friday, April 07, 2006
On Radio Shack and customer sales, and the horror of DRM.
Does anyone remember the phrase 'the customer is always right'?
There are some skilled personal in the retail sector, make up saleswomen, for example, have to know a thing about what colors will compliment your attire and face, but it hardly makes them experts on color theory.
Let's take a look at my experience with radio shack. Yes, they're still around.
Radio Shack is a sales force job, meaning, their primary motivation is to get you to buy something, and move on to the next person. My former roommate made a decent living there. But whatever anyone thinks about my roommate, he's a great salesman. He knows how get on the same wavelength as somebody else, to nodd emphatically and listen.
Here's the situation: I will traveling this weekend, and visiting some friends. These friends and I share a mutual love of a little known hit sci fi show known as Battlestar Galatica. They've only seen what's on the season 2 DVD, which ends on a cliff hanger. I have the ending to that cliff hanger.
Here's the problem. They're in H.264 Protected format. I don't have cable, I don't have TiVo, and I don't plan on changing my habits just to pay another $50 to my local television monopoly. The few shows I'm interested in come to me via iTunes or BitTorrent. BSG just happens to be available from iTunes' Video Store, so naturally, I'm looking for a cable that I can plug into my Mac Book Pro and connect it directly to the TV. At the same time, I gave away my older laptop away, and with it went all my "travel accessories", such as a 1 outlet surge protector. And heck, now that I've got Bluetooth, I might as well pick up a 3 or 4 button wireless Bluetooth mouse, so I won't have to control-click anytime I want to use a contextual menu.
They didn't have any kind of cable that I could use. (I'm betting the Apple Store will).
They didn't carry any cordless or Bluetooth mice that didn't come bundled with a $100 wireless or Bluetooth keyboard.
This is disappointing, but not why I'm ranting.
They did have the travel surge protector. Naturally, they had two kinds. A less expensive, less functional Radio Shack brand surge protector, and some expensive third party brand. The third party surge protector had a quicker response time, and could handle up to 7 times as many joules as the cheap store brand.
"I paid $2500 for my laptop. I figure I can afford to protect my investment with a slightly more expensive surge protector." ($13 dollars total versus $8, tax included)
The radio shack guy looks at me: "What kind of laptop costs $2500?"
I answered him honestly (because yeah, they are effing expensive, but so is Cadillac), "I've got a Mac Book Pro 1.83GHz Core Duo, 2GBRAM, and 100GB 7200RPM Drive."
His reponse starts out great -- bond with the customer, then try to sell him crap he doesn't need: "Oh, awesome. I used macs in college. I studied 3d animation, and we used macs in the studio."
But...
"Nowadays, tho, its mostly just a hobby for me, so I use a PC. I can do Flash design and 3d animation on my desktop, and its pretty fast. The macs always had problems doing distributed rendering over the network. I never have that problem anymore. And you can build a cheap PC that's way faster than a Mac."
I wanted to shoot down the arguments one by one. The better software, like RenderMan, that's been used by Pixar to make such box office flops like Finding Nemo, Toy Story, and let's not forget, A Bug's Life, not only run great on macs, they render great on macs, too -- Xgrid makes distributed processing something that a home user could set up, assuming he had any need for it. And a cheap PC is just that, really, a cheap PC. I've built several of them.
But then I thought, "Why the fuck do I care what this guy thinks of me overpaying for a laptop. He's not traveling two weekends a month, he's not developing across four different environments, and he works at fucking radio shack!"
But my point is, the customer is always right. If your customer says, "I want to buy the expensive item, because I'm a Mac user and I'm so in love with over-paying!", the response you want to make is some bullshit line like, "yeah, they're great. This should really suit your needs!"
Granted, my real problem here is that I watch TV on my computers. And I have no (legal) means of creating a DVD from these downloads with which I could play in off-the-shelf consumer electronics.
However, it was just funny to see a salesman forget the first law of sales: The customer is always right. That's why I pretended to browse the store until another salesman saw me, and let him get whatever the meager commission was for the "premium edition" portable surge protector.
Technorati Tags: Radio Shack, iTunes, Mac+Book+Pro, DRM, Customer+Service, Retail
There are some skilled personal in the retail sector, make up saleswomen, for example, have to know a thing about what colors will compliment your attire and face, but it hardly makes them experts on color theory.
Let's take a look at my experience with radio shack. Yes, they're still around.
Radio Shack is a sales force job, meaning, their primary motivation is to get you to buy something, and move on to the next person. My former roommate made a decent living there. But whatever anyone thinks about my roommate, he's a great salesman. He knows how get on the same wavelength as somebody else, to nodd emphatically and listen.
Here's the situation: I will traveling this weekend, and visiting some friends. These friends and I share a mutual love of a little known hit sci fi show known as Battlestar Galatica. They've only seen what's on the season 2 DVD, which ends on a cliff hanger. I have the ending to that cliff hanger.
Here's the problem. They're in H.264 Protected format. I don't have cable, I don't have TiVo, and I don't plan on changing my habits just to pay another $50 to my local television monopoly. The few shows I'm interested in come to me via iTunes or BitTorrent. BSG just happens to be available from iTunes' Video Store, so naturally, I'm looking for a cable that I can plug into my Mac Book Pro and connect it directly to the TV. At the same time, I gave away my older laptop away, and with it went all my "travel accessories", such as a 1 outlet surge protector. And heck, now that I've got Bluetooth, I might as well pick up a 3 or 4 button wireless Bluetooth mouse, so I won't have to control-click anytime I want to use a contextual menu.
They didn't have any kind of cable that I could use. (I'm betting the Apple Store will).
They didn't carry any cordless or Bluetooth mice that didn't come bundled with a $100 wireless or Bluetooth keyboard.
This is disappointing, but not why I'm ranting.
They did have the travel surge protector. Naturally, they had two kinds. A less expensive, less functional Radio Shack brand surge protector, and some expensive third party brand. The third party surge protector had a quicker response time, and could handle up to 7 times as many joules as the cheap store brand.
"I paid $2500 for my laptop. I figure I can afford to protect my investment with a slightly more expensive surge protector." ($13 dollars total versus $8, tax included)
The radio shack guy looks at me: "What kind of laptop costs $2500?"
I answered him honestly (because yeah, they are effing expensive, but so is Cadillac), "I've got a Mac Book Pro 1.83GHz Core Duo, 2GBRAM, and 100GB 7200RPM Drive."
His reponse starts out great -- bond with the customer, then try to sell him crap he doesn't need: "Oh, awesome. I used macs in college. I studied 3d animation, and we used macs in the studio."
But...
"Nowadays, tho, its mostly just a hobby for me, so I use a PC. I can do Flash design and 3d animation on my desktop, and its pretty fast. The macs always had problems doing distributed rendering over the network. I never have that problem anymore. And you can build a cheap PC that's way faster than a Mac."
I wanted to shoot down the arguments one by one. The better software, like RenderMan, that's been used by Pixar to make such box office flops like Finding Nemo, Toy Story, and let's not forget, A Bug's Life, not only run great on macs, they render great on macs, too -- Xgrid makes distributed processing something that a home user could set up, assuming he had any need for it. And a cheap PC is just that, really, a cheap PC. I've built several of them.
But then I thought, "Why the fuck do I care what this guy thinks of me overpaying for a laptop. He's not traveling two weekends a month, he's not developing across four different environments, and he works at fucking radio shack!"
But my point is, the customer is always right. If your customer says, "I want to buy the expensive item, because I'm a Mac user and I'm so in love with over-paying!", the response you want to make is some bullshit line like, "yeah, they're great. This should really suit your needs!"
Granted, my real problem here is that I watch TV on my computers. And I have no (legal) means of creating a DVD from these downloads with which I could play in off-the-shelf consumer electronics.
However, it was just funny to see a salesman forget the first law of sales: The customer is always right. That's why I pretended to browse the store until another salesman saw me, and let him get whatever the meager commission was for the "premium edition" portable surge protector.
Technorati Tags: Radio Shack, iTunes, Mac+Book+Pro, DRM, Customer+Service, Retail
# posted by Chris Wilson : 6:15:00 PM
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