Sell Me Crap!

It’s a rare day that finds me standing at the front counter when a customer enters the store, but that’s precisely where I was, fooling with my register computer, when my newest redneck customer walked through the front door. “Good morning, sir. Welcome to The Computer Store. What can I do for you?”

“Good mornin’. I just blew me up a power supply and I need a new one. Whatcha got?”

Now, we carry a number of prudcts that I would never put inside of my own computer, but I am particularly proud that this is not the case with our power supplies. Our power supplies (over which I have exercised brutal control and more than one disagreement with vendors) include only the most respectable brands that I can get and nothing that I wouldn’t trust $3000 of my own equipment with. So I was taken aback after I showed this customer to the power supplies and he scowled at the selection. Turning to me he asked, “Where do y’all keep yer Tiger Pros?”

As I’ve stated in the past, I refuse to get into arguments with fanboys and partisans of particular brands of products. In my opinion, it’s like trying to convince a Chevy man to buy a Ford – there’s no succeeding and the best you can hope for is a headache, a sore throat and two wasted hours. That said, there’s always one moron in any crowd who refused to drive a Chevy or a Ford because his Daewoo is better than any other truck. And while I won’t argue with fanboys, the guy with the Daewoo is so damned much fun to tease that I usually can’t help but start into an argument with him.

To call Tiger Pro the Daewoo of power supplies is an insult to Daewoo… Tiger Pro is more appropriately one of those Russian cars that falls apart 3 or 4 years after you buy it. You know, the ones that they don’t bother exporting out of the Eastern Bloc because nobody in his right mind who has any options at all will buy one? Yeah, the Tiger Pro is one of those. If it weren’t for the fact that your average Joe knows absolutely nothing about what’s inside of his computer and that the average Tiger Pro costs a distributor $20, nobody would have a Tiger Pro.

So it was that I shot Joe Redneck a questioning look, “Why on earth do you want a Tiger Pro, sir?”

The scowl changed to a smug smile. “For my money, ain’t nuthin better than a Tiger Pro power supply!” I’ll definitely be needing to check into that money of his before I take it… if it’s not been raided from a Monopoly box, I’m betting it’s just plain old counterfeit.

“Sir, if you consult ANY objective product rating service, Tiger Pro ranks consistently among the worst of power supplies. Last I checked, it was even outranked by 2 or 3 companies who don’t even clearly label their power supplies owing to the questionable reputation of their products. If you hold on a second, I think I have a magazine in the back…”

Joe jumped right in, “Now hold on! That’s just a bunch of bullshit! Jus’ because they don’ want to pay kickbacks to them review places and magazines don’ mean they ain’t got the best damn power supplies out there!” Great… a redneck conspiracy theorist. Maybe he was once abducted by aliens… damned shame that I didn’t find out for sure.

“Well sir, all that notwithstanding, they also have both the highest failure and the greatest attrition rates of any power supply that I’ve gotten into my store, which is especially remarkable given that every computer that comes in for service with a Tiger Pro in it is one that I didn’t put in there. I mean, think about that… I get more computers from other places with Tiger Pros that need work on them than I get of my own customers, whose units I will replace for free: that’s a lot of broken Tiger Pros. Not to mention that, as I said before, when a Tiger Pro goes, it takes out more internal components than any other power supply I’ve seen. That’s like an engine that’s guaranteed to go out 100,000 miles before the competition’s and that’s guaranteed to throw a rod which will take out 50% of the components in your engine compartment when it goes. Why would you want a power supply like that?”

“Yer just’ sayin’ that cuz you don’ like ‘em!” He proclaimed. It was at this point that I kind of slowed down as I noted that his eyes were taking on the glaze of a fanatic under attack. I was apparently going after Joe’s religion.

“Sir, it’s true I dislike them, but that has everything to do with what I’ve just told you. Think about this from my point of view: I can buy Tiger Pros at roughly 20% of the cost of what I buy those power supplies for. So, even if I sold them at half of what I’m selling those power supplies for now, like some of the Other Computer Stores do, I would make a huge profit. If they weren’t just terrible power supplies, what possible reason could I have for not selling them?”

“Cuz yer a crook!” he near-shouted, turning and storming out the front door.

I was tempted to chase after him and shout, “Yeah! That’s it! Fight the logic!” but I didn’t. After all, he didn’t cuss me out. I mean, that really would have hurt my feelings.

~ by assistantmanager on July 22, 2007.