Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!killer!elg From: elg@killer.DALLAS.TX.US (Eric Green) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: What do you want in a Mail order shop? Message-ID: <6955@killer.DALLAS.TX.US> Date: 28 Jan 89 22:17:59 GMT References: Organization: The Unix(R) Connection, Dallas, Texas Lines: 100 in article , limonce@pilot.njin.net (Tom Limoncelli) says: > In article <213@corpane.UUCP> sparks@corpane.UUCP (John Sparks) writes: >> What I want most in a Mail Order Shop: >> [ much deleted ] >> 2> Good Technical Staff: Someone who knows the products he sells, and can >> answer any technical questions I may have about connecting hardware and >> such. > Now how much flaming will I get for suggesting "if you want that, why > don't you go to a dealer and pay for such 'extras'". Please mail me. I have dealt with 4 different Amiga dealers here and in New Orleans. Of the four, only one could tell you anything about the Amiga computer. The rest could tell you lots about PC clones -- but I bought an Amiga, not a PC clone. The problem is that it's impossible to make a living as an Amiga dealer. Most dealers selling Amigas have them only as a sideline. The dealer who is primarily Amiga and sells PC clones as a sideline is a rarity. And of course there ARE people who live in areas without Amiga dealers... althought that's getting rarer nowdays. > I differentiate a dealer from a mail-order house by boxes. You see, > IMHO(!) a mail order house is a person, with some storage space, and a > lot of boxes. He/she can ship you those boxes for a price. He/she > isn't going to know much about the boxes (except what's written on the > outside). Sounds like a recipe for going out of business. Rule 1 of starting a small business: KNOW YOUR MARKET. This means that the retailer must at LEAST know what the computer is, who he's going to sell it to, etc... it would be stupid to advertise programmer's utilities in AmigaVoid, and just as stupid to advertise beginners help books in The Transactor. This can describe many Amiga dealers as well, BTW. Since they are selling Amigas as a sideline, they just have a few boxes of Amigas lying around the place that they're willing to give you in exchange for a few bucks. They don't know exactly what's in those boxes, but that doesn't really matter... the overhead for adding Amiga to your regular trade is fairly minimal, just a matter of moving a few IBM clones over to the side of the storeroom and shoving in a few Amigas instead. > A dealer on the other hand knows what's in the boxes. Usually a Not necessarily (see above). > Dedicating a machine to be "for show" takes a certain amount of money > (overhead). Not much. They got the machine for wholesale price, after all. From all specs I've seen, you need at least $100K, and often 2-3 times that amount, to open up a successful computer store. Using $3K of that for display machines is only the tiniest part of the cost... laying in a stock of software and machines, advertising effectively, and, most of all, salaries for your outside sales staff (the biggest money-maker in a successful computer store) will be the biggest expenses. > Having the machines set up implies that a certain amount > of demo software is there to be viewed In one dealership, there's a few disks of games lying around the Amigas. That's it. No other demos. If you ask to see something else, the salesflak looks dumb (not a difficult task), and says "duh, I dunno how. There's some disks over there, try sticking them in the drive and see if they do something." > dealer has a higher rent and also has to pay for all those "for sale" > signs, appropriate holiday decorations, and of course, the $$,$$$ > dollars that was spent on making the place look nice (carpet and nice > furniture as opposed to "the room" and "the living-room, where I put > the phone where I have the 800 number installed"). None of which have any bearing on technical support.... the best Amiga dealer I've ever found is in a tiny $800/month storefront, the display counters are all hand-made out of surplus stuff from all over, the chairs are metal folding chairs ($10 at K-Mart), and pieces of surplus electronics equipment are lying all over the place... it looks more like a computer graveyard than a computer store (an original 128K Mac, a Franklin Ace, a TI 99/4a, huge linear power supplies that weigh at least 40 pounds, a roll of Belden 50-conductor wire that looks like it was out in the rain for a few years, boxes full of Pet minutiae bought up from a computer store that went under 4-5 years ago.....). It's the only computer store in Southeast Louisiana that knows anything about the Amiga. > Oh, there's also > the overhead of paying more employees than "well, Bob & I just sort of > do it out of our place". Sounds like the above! The owner/technician/manager/whatever greets you at the door, his wife is behind the counter, he has a part-time college student who's paid on a commission basis... of course, specializing in Amigas doesn't bring in so much traffic that you need 5 salesflaks to handle them all, and this area isn't exactly known for its lust for technology.... -- Eric Lee Green ..!{ames,decwrl,mit-eddie,osu-cis}!killer!elg Snail Mail P.O. Box 92191 Lafayette, LA 70509 Netter A: In Hell they run VMS. Netter B: No. In Hell, they run MS-DOS. And you only get 256k.