Why Let a Competitive Commercial Advantage Slip Away by Being Lazy and Brainless? — That Is What Many Brick and Mortar Electronics Stores Have Done
© 2014 Peter Free
31 March 2014
A conundrum regarding local electronic stores’ commercial behavior
By self-satisfied default, local electronics retailers seem to have mostly ceded significant portions of the retail field to online stores like Amazon.
Sheer incompetence has pissed away the advantage they once held in allowing customers to see how electronic devices actually work.
My tablet anecdote
For the past year, I’ve been looking for a tablet that I would predominantly use to read e-books and surf the Internet. But repeated trips to a wide variety of local stores, including Best Buy, has revealed that none bother to keep all their demonstration devices powered and usable. Most are not properly linked to store Wi Fi. Nor do the majority have accessible printed material on them. Many of the devices are broken.
Potential customers cannot try the products out to see where they please and where they don’t.
I’ve have this and similar experiences repeatedly in a variety of locations around the country over the years.
Therefore, what value is the brick and mortar location contributing to the buying experience?
Being competent in retail is not especially difficult
How hard is it to check that a device is working? Or to properly connect a Kindle, Nook, or a competing tablet to the Internet, Amazon and Barnes & Noble?
I have noticed that these stores almost always have a bunch of sales people standing around. However, a daily maintenance check of samples on display seems not to be on anyone’s agenda. No attempt is made to check for Wi Fi connections, battery health, and demonstration content.
Sales people are apparently content to explain how the device would work, if it did.
A car buying metaphor
My experience with buying electronics locally has been similar to going to a car dealership and finding that most of the vehicles’ tires are flat and the engines won’t run — yet with eager salespeople spouting off on how well the car would perform, if it did.
The moral? — The alleged demise of local retailers probably has more to do with lazy incompetence than it does with Amazon and the online juggernaut
People still like to see many kinds of physical items in person. But if local retailers are too lazy, or too stupid to provide that experience, why bother with them?