[dictoresno]

i walked into radioshack this afternoon and asked about playbook accessories to one of the employees.

geeeee i think i found your problem. I NEVER walk into a store, let alone a f'n radioshack, and expect any kind of intelligent answers regarding any items they have for sale. i do ALL my own research so i can just walk in, get what i need, and leave. theres no way some college dropout, working for $9 an hour is gonna give me his heart and soul honest opinion on something i need.

i avoid mainstream stores like the plague. the only reason ill go to one and talk to one of their associates, is when i point to which thing i want and tell them to get it for me. no sales pitch, no BS.

[Erandhawa]

radioshack employees are only good for batteries and thats only 50% of the time beyond that they are completely useless. I've had to show hem they sell items in their stores they dont even know about on more than once occasion.

Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com

[Jake Storm]

If I really felt it was bad service (it may have been) I'd report it to his employer. I'm not his boss, and it isn't my job to train him.

If the employee was nice and curious, that is one thong...

Tech stores sell lingerie in florida?

[Jake Storm]

...i do ALL my own research so i can just walk in, get what i need, and leave. theres no way some college dropout, working for $9 an hour is gonna give me his heart and soul honest opinion on something i need. ..

My friend's daughter works at TheSource (Canadian equivalent of RadioShack) I was at his house the other day and she says I should get rid of my BB because the stock price is dropping. WTF?
I had to explain to her that the stock price had no effect on the function of my phone.

[sallyhats]

"Seems like a BS narration to me too" hey grncherry u think its bs.. do me a favor and go to bayridge brooklyn and ask one of the employees who works there on a saturday if its bull****.. im sure you'll find the right one

I live a couple blocks from there I'll check it out.

[reeneebob]

Doublepost

[reeneebob]

geeeee i think i found your problem. I NEVER walk into a store, let alone a f'n radioshack, and expect any kind of intelligent answers regarding any items they have for sale. i do ALL my own research so i can just walk in, get what i need, and leave. theres no way some college dropout, working for $9 an hour is gonna give me his heart and soul honest opinion on something i need.

i avoid mainstream stores like the plague. the only reason ill go to one and talk to one of their associates, is when i point to which thing i want and tell them to get it for me. no sales pitch, no BS.

You seem to think you are better than others. Mainly better than lowly store employees. I can assure you I have a college diploma, make considerably more than $9 an hour, and spend hours reading up on tech to be able to assist customers. If you get bad service in stores it's likely due to your superiority complex and demeaning way of speaking to dirty, unwashed retail workers.

Good lord, you must really be an important person.

[esqlaw]

With all due respect, I could not disagree more. It is passivity that allows customer service to fester like this. I never put up with poor service. What if everyone did? Why should anyone try harder? He is only doing the sales person a service to try harder in life, do some research so he doesn't embarrass himself...give himself a little pride in what he has learned or knows..

Besides how much fun would you miss showing him how wrong he is?

Why should anyone try harder? TO MAKE A SALE

[ImsoUhoez]

I would have laid the HANDS OF GOD ON HIM LOL

[erhan8]

lol

PIN: Wouldnt you like to HAVE ONE

lol

sorry couldn't help myself

[youngdrake]

I worked for radioshack and I have to say that the first device I pointed would be tablet buyers to was the pb. That said, the launch of the pb and the strategy of radio shack to sell it was atrocious. They sent us brackets that allowed us to only mount it in portrait mode which was a mistake because half of the software it launched with only worked in landscape. I had customers who unplugged the pb and used its power cable to charge their own phones which required us to bind the charger with ugly zip ties. The RS employee you talked to was either newly hired or full of crap because there was training materials complete with quiz for the pb. The biggest hurdle with the playbook was that most people who walk into radioshack and ogle the tablets are completly idiotic and think a 150 dollar micro tablet with 256 megs ram 2 gigs storage and a 400 mhz processor running froyo is the same thing as the 500 dollar playbook next to it because they were the same size... Radioshack botched the launch and the companies indifference lead to the associates indifference. Our display constantly stopped working and I had to bring out my personal pb to show an interested customer. That said ... I never sold a single Playbook besides the one i sold myself. but plenty of ebook readers running froyo. *sigh*

[louzer]

Which is why there are so many morons. Not many would take the time to educate one. Kudos to the OP. Why anyone would criticize this and pick it apart and judge it exaggerated and for what gain is beyond me.

If you were talking about my reply calling it out for exaggeration, it's just that there are many topics like this one already. I read them, because I'm in utter disbelief when I see the way retailers display Playbooks. I've even posted a couple of my own retail experiences. As a result, I've spoken to a Best Buy store manager about one and have emailed Stapes about another.

The problem here is that I think that most of the story is probably true. The red flag was thrown for me when the OP talked about gonig into app world to show some games and then showed the salesperson how the bridge works. If he left the part out about the salesperson entering the password to take the device out of demo mode it might not have registered with me. I haven't seen a Playbook in any store running full out since the initial launch. Since the third update (fixing demo mode), what I see are a) broken Playbooks or b) Playbooks running demo mode that don't allow you to enter the settings screen. And the only time I've demoed the bridge is when I have my own Playbook with me. Even though it's incredibly secure, I'd never bridge my phone to a store's Playbook. And, if you can't get into settings, you can't set up the bridge anyway.

I'm well aware of the problem and would love to see Playbooks showcased properly in stores to at least give them a fighting chance. My only point is that I think the story changed slightly a couple of times from the time he left the store to the time he actually posted. I could be wrong, but I was just stating an observations. I don't fault the OP for being as pissed off as the rest of us. Just sayin' that perhaps the OP's emotions might have gotten the best of him. We're all a little anxious with past disappointment, the outage, media bashing, and the unkown. Hopefully by Tuesday, we'll have something a little more concrete to write about. 57 hours until the keynote!

[BSFA2008]

"knowledgement"

[freedomx20a]

the 1 accessory you need is the leather book case thingy. Sorry I didn't read your post but one accessory you need! Looks like a book. Ppl wont know its a playbook. Magnets keep it closed and you can use it as a stand vertical and laying downish...so 30 degree angle. both nice.

[stevelord]

i walked into radioshack this afternoon and asked about playbook accessories to one of the employees.. his response while laughing was " to my knowledgement i have never seen anyone buy a playbook and so we have no accessories for it". So obviously i said to him have u ever shown a playbook to one of your customers who are looking for a tablet. he turns around and says " he doesnt show the playbook because he was never trained in it and that there are better tablets out there". So i said " if u never picked the playbook up and used it for a min how can u say that there are better tablets out there when in fact u dont know nothing about it" Then i told him to come over to the tablet section and of course the playbook was the ONLY tablet that was not turned on. What a joke! i asked him to turn it on and i started demonstrating some of the fine things the playbook could do if u actually wanna learn about the device.. i showed him the multitasking, the blackberry bridge, hi res video and so.. so of course he turns around and says " i like to play "1st person shooter" games in my tablet and the playbook has none" So once again he had to be schooled.. i quickly clicked the blackberry app world and typed in "gameloft" in the search button and bam modern combat 2 and nova 2hd popped up. i showed him adrenaline and need for speed as well.. at the end of our conversation he couldnt believe what this playbook could do and said to me " which i thought was pretty funny" that he would order accessories for the playbook since they have every other accessory for every other tablet.. can some one please explain to me why none of these employees who work in these stores have any cluee on how to use the playbookkk.. thats my story.. i smiled and leftt

If you're going to go on some rant about how awesome you are...at least make the rant somewhat readable. This lessens your credibility to some (or in my case, you destroyed it completely). If that was put together on a PB.....then some might suspect it be a terrible device to type on. Ya know...with the apparent lack of an ENTER key and autocorrection for even the simplest grammatical errors.

[bayotte]

Dude, I do the same thing. My wife says I'm a freak and she's probably right, but you know what I get a kick out of it. I like to think that I can make a difference. I hate seeing what the market is doing to the company that played a major role in building it. So if I can share my appreciation by teaching to others, more power to Blackberry.

Keep on sharing the knowledge people.

[ichat]

And then they say RIM is dead. Yea bummer man! If you dont even SHOW your customers the Playbook then the world will think RIM is dead. Talk about common sense.....

[vespajet]

Radio Shack is trying to stay relevant in this day and age of the big box electronics retails, and is failing miserably. In recent years, I've gone into several Radio Shack locations and they were dead in terms of customers. They seem to hire employees that have just enough knowledge to be dangerous. These are folks that perhaps spent some time in the electronics department at Walmart, Target or K-Mart and think that can sell electronics.

It seems as though many retailers that are selling the PlayBook do not have staff that is knowledgeable of all of the products in their department or are so biased against RIM products that they try to push the other tablets on you instead. Hey genius, if we wanted an iPad2 or a Galaxy Tab, we would have been asking about them, and not the PlayBook. I was actually surprised by the sales associate at the Best Buy I bought my PlayBook at because he actually seemed to have read the literature and paid attention in class. Probably the exception to the rule......

If a store is not going to sell accessories to a device they sell in the store, then they need to stop selling the device or order the accessories. Why force a customer to have to go elsewhere in order to buy accessories which if you work on commission, you're cheating yourself out of some $.

[ph03n1x]

well i think first of all there needs to be better training of employees and that should come from the corporate and/or rim once that happens then i think it would be better imo

[Darlaten]

Do people, in this day and age, seriously ask sales persons for information? I guess I'm in the minority here; but I would never ever consider asking any sales person, from any store, for advice or information. That's what the Internet is for.

Heck, for that matter, when at all possible, I avoid stores all together as I prefer to order everything online and get it delivered. I can't handle slow cashiers nor stupid people waiting in line arguing about a .5 cent coupon that expired yet they want to use it.

[anon(1049620)]

Last Playbook I saw actually working in a store display was 2 months ago at Staples. Since then I've probably seen a dozen or so dead/turned off.

[AceStreaming]

Is this some gimmick? I mean nowadays, People are posting reps laughing or insulting the blackberry, So much of this makes me think this is fake

(No offence)

[ashackguy]

i know this is an older thread but i just wanted to give some insight. i work for a radio shack. im by no means a electronics genius but know enough to help people with what there trying to do with a product. in my store we have a playbook demo model. it is never charged. reason being when we first got the playbook it needed an update. it was a demo model sent out before it was available to the public. but our wonderful firewall wont let us download it. and the reset instructions so i can switch from our in store wifi to my hotspot failed on several occassions. i want to show it to people and sell it but without a working model its hard, especialy when its on sale from time to time for only 299.

[anon(1429304)]

Found it kind of funny when the PlayBook first came out. Back in April, I'd go into Chapters to study and have a cup of coffee and the PlayBook was on display alongside all the other eBook readers. I tried it out for the first time and was impressed, and apparently I wasn't the only one. One of the sales associates couldn't take their hands off of not one, but both display units! Even with curious customers wanting to ask questions about it he'd simply ignore them and continue to swipe away at the PlayBook. It was to a point where I noticed he would put the PlayBook down, walk around for a few minutes and come back to the other one and repeat the same process. By the time I had finised studying I wanted to try them out again...and to my surprise both were dead, the Chapters employee couldn't keep his hands off of them!

[peter9477]

... but our wonderful firewall wont let us download it.

And has nobody thought of just arranging with the store manager to take the darn thing home for a night so you can update it over WiFi at your own house, then bring it back all ready to go?