Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
I have heard one mildly rational explanation as to why showrooming and buying online is wrong -- it specifically referred o wasting the employees' valuable time getting help, with the intent to bu online.
Of course, you can still defend that as comparison shopping, plain and simple. 
Regardless, bookstores don't suffer that flaw -- the cashiers usually know nothing about books and cannot recommend anything useful. |
Funny I have always thought that the employee was there for the customer not the other way round. Granted they hope to make a sale, but clerks are there to help those who come to their store. My dad had an experience once with the manager of a store (no longer here) once. He picked up a magazine and glanced through it to see if he wanted to buy it and the guy made a remark to the effect that it was a store not a library. Needless to say my dad didn't go back. Did the guy have a point? Perhaps. But certainly my dad wasn't hurting anything by looking through the magazine before deciding whether to purchase it or not, and the guy could have phrased his comments far better I'm sure. I'm of the opinion that a store is there for its customers, not the other way round. If the customer isn't happy they won't come back again, and what's worse they'll tell others about the bad service at (store name) which may result in other sales being lost to that store as well. It's not just book stores that have people who don't know their product either. When I got my 1st computer (a TRS-80 16 k computer) I bought it at the Radio Shack in the town I was living in back then. Later I got a dot matrix printer, but the printer didn't have a cable with it to connect it to the computer. So I had to go back to the store and see about buying one. The owner didn't know what I was talking about. I had to look it up in the catalog myself. He'd started as a TV repair shop owner and just gotten into electronics later so he didn't know the first thing about what he was selling.