Adventures in holiday shopping
Here's the situation: I'm buying my Mom a new PC and printer for her birthday/Christmas present this year. Her current PC is one my cousin built something like 6-7 years ago. It only runs Windows 95 to give you an idea of just how slow we're talking here.
While I normally build my own PC's, my Mom doesn't need nearly the horsepower that I do (since I mainly do gaming on mine.) All Mom does is email and surf the net. The major PC makers can put together pretty decent lower end systems for a lot less than I can build one, so I decided to just buy one. I decided on a nice Compaq Athlon system and darph_bobo and I went to Best Buy last Saturday to get it.
So while we were there, the idiot sales guy I had first couldn't get it through his head that I did *not* want the crappy 17" CRT monitor nor the crappy ink jet printer that came with the system. Nor was I going to buy them to try to sell on ebay to "get my money back". (Um...Hello? Why would I spend money only to sell the items to get it back when I could just not buy them in the first place?) Then the idiot sales guy tries to get me to buy an eMachines box. Um, no thanks. eMachines doesn't have a good rep and I am *not* buying my Mom a crappy box. The sales guy's quip was that since I "knew how to fix them, I could just fix it." My reply was that I didn't want to end up fixing it all the time. Compaq/HP has a good reputation and I want a Compaq PC. While I'm trying to decide between two boxen (sales guy not helping me here) the sales guy decides to just walk away and start talking to someone else! I'm like, um...hello? You are supposed to be helping me here... I wait a bit, but the guy just ignores me. I'm annoyed by this point so we walk out. (We were in the store less than 20 minutes.)
I check out the system I'm interested on line and decide I'm going to order it and the printer. Hrm...I can do an in-store pickup so no shipping fees. Hey, the printer's on sale. Cool! Oh, and I got their rewards card too. Cool!
I'm really glad the sales guy pissed me off. I saved $50 on the printer and got a $10 gift card out of the deal :)
While I normally build my own PC's, my Mom doesn't need nearly the horsepower that I do (since I mainly do gaming on mine.) All Mom does is email and surf the net. The major PC makers can put together pretty decent lower end systems for a lot less than I can build one, so I decided to just buy one. I decided on a nice Compaq Athlon system and darph_bobo and I went to Best Buy last Saturday to get it.
So while we were there, the idiot sales guy I had first couldn't get it through his head that I did *not* want the crappy 17" CRT monitor nor the crappy ink jet printer that came with the system. Nor was I going to buy them to try to sell on ebay to "get my money back". (Um...Hello? Why would I spend money only to sell the items to get it back when I could just not buy them in the first place?) Then the idiot sales guy tries to get me to buy an eMachines box. Um, no thanks. eMachines doesn't have a good rep and I am *not* buying my Mom a crappy box. The sales guy's quip was that since I "knew how to fix them, I could just fix it." My reply was that I didn't want to end up fixing it all the time. Compaq/HP has a good reputation and I want a Compaq PC. While I'm trying to decide between two boxen (sales guy not helping me here) the sales guy decides to just walk away and start talking to someone else! I'm like, um...hello? You are supposed to be helping me here... I wait a bit, but the guy just ignores me. I'm annoyed by this point so we walk out. (We were in the store less than 20 minutes.)
I check out the system I'm interested on line and decide I'm going to order it and the printer. Hrm...I can do an in-store pickup so no shipping fees. Hey, the printer's on sale. Cool! Oh, and I got their rewards card too. Cool!
I'm really glad the sales guy pissed me off. I saved $50 on the printer and got a $10 gift card out of the deal :)