cwc@mhuxd.UUCP (Chip Christ) (03/03/84)
- What follows may sound like heresy, but her goes anyway. If you were the owner of a "nice little computer store down the street," you'd see those attempts to preserve "list price" a lot differently. I have a friend in the computer business who avoids retailing (as opposed to dealing in commercial accounts) like the plague because of this experience. At one time, he carried Atari computer equipment and would regularly have hours of his and his partner's time taken up by prospective customers, only to have them finally buy at a discount place to save $100. One of the reasons the discount place could afford to undercut him was the fact that they didn't have enough product knowledge to spend the time with customers. Some of these people even had the balls to come back into his place looking for some hand-holding that they couldn't get from the discount joint. After all, he was an Atari dealer, wasn't he? Needless to say, he now has as little to do with the general public as possible. And those new computer owners who, unlike most of us on the net, need some hand-holding, are increasingly finding themselves holding their behinds. Chip