Friday, May 7, 2010

What's The Deal?

I used to work sales. I have to say selling anything electronic to a baby boomer is one of the worst experiences in sales anyone could ever have the curse of going through. They always want to buy the cheapest piece of electronic crap they can find with no understanding of "you get what you pay for" when it comes to electronics. The thing about baby boomers is they were raised in a time when the bigger, badder, more energy using cars, trucks, vans, SUV's were the optimal purchase. So the end result is they don't think it strange to throw down sixty thousand dollars on a massive gas-guzzling street-terrorizing roadhog on four wheels and yet to them the idea of buying a four hundred dollar cell phone that takes high quality digital pictures, has internet access, takes high quality full motion video, holds videos, pictures, music and other things either frivolous or offensive. I remember verbally jousting with baby boomers insisting I drop the price of items such as Blackberry's or iPod's below cost because "It's just a little bit of plastic, it should be free anyway" almost like we should have had a bin so when you walk in the store you just grab a Blackberry on your way in and an iPod on your way out. They have no idea how much research and development that goes into each and every new item that comes out on todays' market. Maybe it's a generational gap of technological understanding. Most of them don't own them but want to but don't want to take the time to learn how to operate their own things. I remember one time a mother and her daughter came in to purchase a cell phone since the girl lost her cell and the mother was there to buy a replacement. I remember the daughter's total embarressment at her mother's harsh insistence that I give her a $279.99 cell phone for free since, "it's so small, how can it be that much? I don't want to pay." The girl was so embarressed and just told me, "sorry, my mom doesn't get it, at all." Well baby boomers, I have to say those little cell phones that can check the weather, check your facebook, look up googlemaps, do your banking or take videos and pictures in real time and send them online ARE worth the several hundred dollars and NO they are not free and never will be. The day they are will be the day General Motors and Ford give away brand new vehicles for free no questions asked. After all, a vehicle is "just" a bunch of metal, rubber and plastic. I remember the skin on my neck literally crawling when anyone over forty came to buy anything electronic.

1 comment:

  1. I can completely understand this man..I get it ALLLLL the time.

    "It's just paper and ink, you just snapped that with a camera, i can go out and do that on my HP home printer too, why do you charge several hundred for it? you're ripping me off! I bought an original painting of nobody-in-particular for 250 000 $ - that was worth it because painting is REAL art blahblahblahblahblahi'm-an-over-obsessive-consumer-freak-with-no-common-sense"

    :D

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