I went to the Apple store at Lenox mall in Atlanta last night, fully intending to lay down a truck load on a Macbook Pro. For quick background, I’ve been a long-time Mac hater. It started out as actual hatred, and then just got funny and I ran with it. I will get unending crap from friends and family if I buy a Mac. Nevertheless, off I went thinking I was going to buy one. Lately I’ve been having a really hard time with Windows, my machine just creeps to a halt from time to time – explorer windows open really slowly, and I get the occassional BSOD, etc. I’m doing the “virus scan, registry clean up, hard drive check, screw it just reboot” dance with windows and am finally fed up. I want to be a computer user, not a computer mechanic. So, I figured, it was time to go Mac. I should also say that I was at Google I/O and everybody had Macs and it looked awesome and I was seduced by shiny.
So, enter the Apple store at Lenox mall. I walk in and instead of seeing shiny and awesome, I see croweded and hectic. I actually was meeting Josh, and he wasn’t there yet, so I bolted and bought a new pair of Pumas, trying not to panic and be all introverted and bothered by the insane crowds. So, I go back and start playing with a Mac. It was shiny. And nice. Though, really, they should have them positioned at a higher level, because damn my wrist hurt quickly using a mousepad at such a low level. I try to figure out how to get a sales person over to help, so I do my “Hi, my name is Eric and I’m awkward” deal and throw my hand up and say “help”. Some guy sees me, kind of looks around like “is there anybody else who can help him” and then slowly comes over. I probably screwed up, because I started off with “I’m a windows user looking to leave, and have very specific high maintenance requirements”, and then asked “can this macbook pro drive two external monitors?”.
“uhhmmm, yes”.
“Really? Without anything extra?”
“Oh, you’d need an adapter that is like $20″
Josh chimes in: “Really? Is that new, I thought it couldn’t be done without external stuff?”
“Hmmm, I’ll have to go find out for sure”
He returns several minutes later with a printed out blog post about how you actually can’t do it without external stuff. Hmmm, sales guy has to go to Google to find out the answer? This is not looking good. So, I go and request another sales person to help me and get the poor first week on the job guy. I tell him about the experience with the last guy (again, in hindsight, this served no purpose) and he didn’t fully understand and said “yeah, you can drive two external monitors!”. Sigh. The rest of the conversation went similarly “can I do x?”, “uhmmm, let me go check”. What the hell? Josh knew far more than they did about their own product. The last question I wanted answered was what the return policy is. He said “14 day full return policy” and when Josh pressed the issue, he went and checked and came back with “errr, there’s a 10% re-stocking fee”. Beyond their sales guy not knowing anything about their product (he said he just completed a week of training… wonder if there was a test at the end of it that asked anything Mac related?), I think that return policy is terrible. If they believe in their product, they’d offer a full refund. Ecco shoes does, because their shoes are friggin’ awesome.
One Comment
Yeah, it was a pitiful experience all around. You also forgot the line “well, you can’t expect everyone to know everything”. That’s true, the salespeople might not know everything, but at the very least we should expect them to say when they don’t know the answer instead of throwing bs out at you to get you to buy the machine. Oh, and throwing the blame on the customer, especially after they get a bunch of bs from your sales associate, is not a very good customer service technique.