Valhalla Island

Something I’ve noticed while watching TV in North America is the difference in the way retail stores (especially electronics retailers) are advertised. They’re almost always advertised with a scene from the store — customer and salesperson in conversation. This never happens in Australia, retail stores always advertise the products they sell.

I find this strange because, for me, the experience of walking into a store and being spoken to by a salesperson (especially at electronics retailers) is not a pleasant one. What’s stranger still is that this experience is much worse in North America, the same place that uses this process to lure customers into their stores with advertising.

Salespeople on commissions seem to be more common here which makes for far more unreliable salespeople. They don’t care about selling you the most ideally suited product they care about selling you the products with the highest commissions. Generally they don’t have a clue and couldn’t sell you the right thing even if they wanted to. I’ve found that electronics salespeople tend to be measurebators and don’t really know anything about what they’re selling anyway.

The experience is worse for people that don’t know much about computers. They’re hit with a torrent of numbers that don’t mean anything to them. Best Buy’s advertising is big on this — in every commercial the salesperson’s big line is that it has “an Intel Core 2 Duo processor”. Who cares? People want to know what they can do with a computer not the details of what’s inside.