Quote:
Originally Posted by MovieBird
My experience is that live salesmen hardly ever know WTF they're doing.
|
Not all that uncommon, it's true. But still, in my experience, more useful than Amazon's suggestion system, which is a waste of electrons. In my experience.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MovieBird
Not even in the technical world. Invariably when trying to get something specialized for work I end up having to correspond with the manufacturing engineer as the salesman doesn't know anything about his own product besides collecting a commission. Which sucks because the whole point of the sales person is to provide a buffer so the engineer can do engineering, not customer support.
|
That does not sound like the sort of stuff you'd buy from Barnes & Noble, or Amazon.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MovieBird
For consumer goods, the salesman is 99.99% of the time clueless about the product, even on technical but common items like TVs.
|
I don't shop at places like that if there's
any other choice.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MovieBird
The exception here is with photography equipment. I've been impressed by the knowledge of almost every gruff, iconoclastic photography store worker I've dealt with.
|
That's because you're talking about people who work in photography stores, I would guess, rather than people who work in, say, Best Buy, which sells the same gear for the most part, along with a zillion other things. If you want specialized knowledge, go to a specialty shop. Amazon will never equal that kind of service, nor should they even bother to try.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MovieBird
Amazon has a good bit of information if it's sold by Amazon LLC, but the 3rd party descriptions usually suck. The saving grace is that I can open up another tab and just look up the specs on Newegg, or Google, or wherever. That's not Amazon specifically, but it takes less time and effort to find what I need and comparison shop than it would by talking to a sales person
|
If you can find what you need that way. For getting technical specs, yeah, you usually can. For an actual recommendation on what you really want, not so much, in my experience, because the manufacturer can't tell how you're going to use their stuff, only how they expect you to.
The bottom line is, retail service isn't always what you want or need, but when it is, a mail order store with a web page isn't going to provide it.