Text 13205, 83 rader
Skriven 2009-09-16 15:16:48 av Ross Cassell (1:123/456)
  Kommentar till text 13200 av Maurice Kinal (1:261/38)
Ärende: drunk or sober
======================
Hello Maurice!

16 Sep 09 01:57, you wrote to me:

 >> If you infer that I work for a place like Walmart, Kmart or
 >> Target, you infer wrong..

 MK> I already know since you told me before.  I do know that your place of
 MK> employment was never a hotbed for the computer geek crowd, despite
 MK> them possibly shopping there from time to time, but seldom for
 MK> computer parts. Occasionally but never anything major computerly
 MK> speaking.

No, what we sell is typically out of the box ready to use equipment, but our
tech dept, which is where I work, isnt much different from that of Best Buy's,
sans the Xbox's and Playstations. In fact, for Brick and Mortar retail, Office
Depot, Office Max or Staples would be the best place to find a wider selection
of Printers, AIO's or scanners, than you would find in a Electronics retailer
like Best Buy... Ditto for Networking equipment, GPS and Digital cameras.

In my market, we have no Fry's, the nearest Compusa shut its doors and Circuit
City is gone.

We used to carry Power Supplies, but the nearest thing to a standalone internal
component we sell would be computer memory, ditto for Best Buy, everything else
would be considered a external peripheral or accessory.

Again, in the brick and mortar environ.

There are fewer places to walk in for the power user, Wayne has that option
near him, but around here, most of the Mom and Pops have shuttered or converted
to being places to get repairs.

When one can get inside a Desktop or Laptop in the Sub $400 range, out of the
box..

 >> We cater to the small business.

 MK> Understood.  I couldn't say one way or the other what ratio of geeks
 MK> to unknowing run small businesses.  Never did run across any
 MK> statistics along that line.  Have you observed a drop as to the number
 MK> of geeks that shop there for business related goods over time?

Most small businesses will:

Do their own IT, maybe one employee..

Outsource their IT, up to and including leasing equipment.

Do w/o IT and muddle through

(Depends on the nature of the business)

My regulars, come in and they know what they want and get it..

What I have noticed is the people coming in buying their very first computer or
buying one for the first time in a long time.

 >> Long gone are the days where the geeks outnumbered the unknowing
 >> in the computing world, which is what I should have said to begin
 >> with.

 MK> Depends how you define the computing world.  I am guessing that in the
 MK> more traditional number crunching computer world the geekness factor
 MK> is still as high as it ever was.  If anything I'd guesstimate that
 MK> since more PC-ish equipment made inroads into that realm there are
 MK> more geeks these days then there ever was before simply because
 MK> suitable equipment is readily available and far more affordable.  That
 MK> your place of business never catered to this particular segment of the
 MK> computer world would be the reason they aren't readily observable.

Given the other alternatives in the Brick And Mortar retail environment what we
carry is often the same if not deeper, but all I am saying is the ranks of the
uninformed are greater than they ever were..

==
Ross
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