Retail Salespeople Completely Ignorant About Netbooks

Chances are the if you’re reading this blog, you know a thing or two about netbooks, the low-cost, lightweight PCs that have become the darlings of the laptop industry. If you were unfamiliar with the category, however, and were in the hunt for a new computer, you might turn to your friendly neighborhood retailer for guidance–but is it a valuable source of information? Not based on our encounters.

Over the past week or so, I’ve made the rounds of various computer-carrying retailers to see which store employees could give me an accurate description of netbooks and their capabilities. Although netbooks are a relatively new class of notebook (we did just celebrate the pioneering Eee PC’s second birthday, after all), we expected the salespeople to be at least somewhat familiar with the products on their shelves. Sadly, many were not.

Here are some of the gems the salespeople at Costco, Best Buy, Staples, and Wal-Mart told us when we came in, posing as an average customer:

Costco (Comack, Long Island, NY)

• “Everyone is making them, even Mac.” (Really? I don’t think the Nokia Booklet 3G counts.)

Staples (Manhattan, NY)

• “This only comes with 1GB of space.” (She confused RAM with storage, and tried to sell me on an external hard drive)
• “We have external and internal [DVD drives]. We can install it for you.” (Where, in your magic department?)

Wal-Mart (Islandia, Long Island, NY)

• “They have small batteries–they’re only this big [makes tiny box with hands]. You can’t get much out of that.” (Yeah, I could see how 6 to 8 hours of battery life could be a bummer.)
• “I wouldn’t recommend a netbook to anyone with extremely thick fingers…one finger can cover two keys.” (Maybe on the first netbooks from a couple years ago, but not now.)

Best Buy (Bay Shore, Long Island, NY)

• “[Netbooks] are full of old Intel processors that are marginally better than a decade-old desktop.” (This statement isn’t that far off, but we’d take today’s Atom netbooks over the bulky Pentium notebooks of yesteryear any day.)

Certainly, these stores have knowledgeable employees, but it’s clear that some in their ranks are in desperate need of netbook boot camp. Realistically, I didn’t expect any of the blue or red shirts to rattle off  “1.6-GHz processor” or “Nvidia Ion” at the drop of a hat, but they should at least be familiar with the basics.

Is that too much to ask, guys?