Inspirational Technology

PC sales must really be bad

This weekend I paid a visit to a Comp USA location that I hadn't been to in a while. It's in a pretty affluent part of town and when I walked in I was headed for the PC section and well I almost couldn't find it. It used to be a large section in the back of the store, very prominent. Now it's a single isle in the middle of the store. I never counted PCs at Comp USA before, but it sure seemed they cut down the number of models severely and even if they didn't they definitely cut down the display size and moved it to a much less prominent location. It seemed really strange to see this in a Comp USA. My interpretation of this is an indication that actual computers aren't the big draw in the store anymore.

Assuming that they use the same product placement tactics as grocery stores, you want to put the items that draw the most people at the back of the store. This way you have to walk past as much other product as possible before getting to the often purchased items like Milk. In Comp USA the PC section was always in the prime back of store location, now it's CDs and CD jewel boxes. This may just be a quirk of the store manager in that location, but I thought it was kind of interesting. The other Comp USA I visited a couple weeks ago still had PCs at the back.

Oh yeah, this Comp USA only had a Toshiba Tablet PC on display like a regular laptop. In fact I walked right by it and didn't even notice it was a Tablet PC. I had to ask an employee if they had a display. The rack it was in didn't even allow you to rotate the display. That makes five stores that I've visited where the Tablet PC is given no special treatment at all. So far the Gateway Country store was the only place that had a somewhat prominent display for their Tablet PC. However, even there the clerk I talked to really didn't know all that much about it and failed to adequately answer my questions (questions I of course already knew the answers to). I'm still pretty convinced that interest in Tablet PCs is not strong at all. Maybe it's different in corporate environments that don't purchase through retail stores, who knows.