>it made me pine for the days when you could walk into a shop and a knowledgeable salesperson would ask you a few questions and pick the right stuff for you.
With all this lamentation about electronics stores of years past, nothing will compare to the malicious incompetence of car dealerships and service departments. Their business model these days is “if we all keep behaving badly together, consumers will have no choice but to accept our lies, markups, and chicanery”. The dealer groups paying politicians through campaign contributions to allow them to block manufacturer-direct sales (look up how you can’t buy a Tesla in Michigan, home of The Motor City, for example) is just the cherry on top.
Buying a new car is one of my absolutely least favorite things to do - even worse then doing my taxes. I will avoid it at all costs.
Current vehicle is coming up on 10 years old, hoping to get another 10 out of it - not because I can't afford a new one (I can), but because I feel like I have to take a shower every time I walk out of a car dealer.
LOL, I spent a number of years working with some very adept sales people. I was in a supporting role, but learned a ton.
For a while, I was buying cars for people because they hated it. I would save them a ton, and get a nice spiff for each one.
What I did was work through their whole process and then work them, usually getting out of there at invoice plus a few percent. Average deal took 4 to 6 hours. And the work would involve a dry run purchase somewhere other than where the target buy would happen. Sometimes a second one just find where the pivot points are and what it takes to swing them in buyers favor.
Started the whole thing on a new Expedition purchase in the '00s. It worked well, the MSRP was something like $45K, and I got the rig for $32K and some change. Not all the deals were that dramatic. Depended on the target car and time of year, but there was always mid to high 4 figures that could come out of the deal.
I've never purchased a new car for myself since. And I quit doing it for others a few years in.
The whole thing is generally terrible. While it was a sort of sport, fine! Game on. But it got soul draining very quickly.
Many dealers have responded with a hard line, "no bullshit" kind of approach, being willing to push people away and just take the ones who will pay and appreciate a smooth transaction. And those people will just pay more and just don't generally care.
And no judgement. That's worth... about mid to high 4 figures apparently.
Right now? No way. Sellers have all the advantages, and even better used car deals are crazy due to the shortages and the impact all that has on car pricing.
Could not imagine attempting it again today. Would be a mess, and probably would get told to pound sand. Look at the Ford dealers putting the squeeze on people who pre-ordered the EV F150! Pay an extra $30k right now, or continue to wait for it... Brutal.
> Buying a new car is one of my absolutely least favorite things to do
It's still annoying, but do it online and have your own financing.
Most dealerships are stupid, but a couple have figured out that if they offer a reasonable price online they can move cars with very little touch.
Having your own financing prevents idiocy from when you walk into the dealership to sign the paperwork. Unless the dealer has something special, you're never going to do better than your own financing.
Do be aware, buying a car right now is simply totally apeshit. Until the supply and demand equilibrate, things are going to be weird.
Yeah right. Two days ago I go into our local electrical goods store. I would like a USB-C to HDMI adaptor, I say. Sales guy looks around, scratches his nut. Sorry don't have one he says. Then he wanders off. I turn around and see one on the shelf. The price is double what you can get online. I tell him this. He shrugs and scratches his other nut and wanders off again. I walk out.
Yeah, I went into a Home Depot store that wasn't my regular location a couple weeks back looking for dowel rods. Trying to speed up my trip I asked two different employees on my way to the general area of the store which specific aisle they would be on. Neither of them even knew what a dowel rod was, let alone what aisle it might be on, and obviously neither of them would be qualified to proactively try to help avoid the ones with knots or badly angled grain. It's not just that sales staff are ignorant nowadays, it's that the job itself has practically vanished.
On that very topic, I saw a customer ask an employee manning the wood cutting station at a Home Depot if he could cut a dowel rod in half. The employee didn't know if it was possible because it was "round." I think they realized they can get away with just not training their employees.
Cutting round things in a saw can be dangerous if they aren't clamped correctly: they can spin. (Don't know of a link, this was taught to me at community college in the context of cutting round metal stock in a band saw.)
Did Home Depot ever teach their employees that kind of stuff? I always assumed they hired people with previous knowledge/experience. It's possible that there are just less people with that experience, that also want to work at a store like Home Depot.
>>Did Home Depot ever teach their employees that kind of stuff? I always assumed they hired people with previous knowledge/experience.
I think they used to hire people with industry experience - i.e. semi-retired or retired plumbers, electricians, carpenters handymen etc and that worked pretty well coming of the 2008 RE meltdown and economic mess at that time - but now any halfway qualified tradesperson can make close to or more than a six figure salary - so working at HD for $15/hr doesn't seem all that attractive anymore.
I don't even try to ask the employees any actual 'technical' questions - I am happy if they can just point me to the correct aisle to find what I need these days.
In that specific situation there’s likely training because operating a saw can be dangerous and incurs liability, not because Home Depot wants to impart knowledge to customers.
With Home Depot/Lowes the employee (or you) can look up on the item on the web site and it will show you the row/bay its located in. Dont be surprised when you see staff know even less about where things are located.
> The bad news is that physical stores simply do not carry any diversity nowadays, so their knowledge is irrelevant.
Is that a "nowadays" thing though? At least in my location, the reason a lot of us flocked to the online option was the diversity of options available. Physical stores (for understandable reasons) stocked only the few top-selling options, knew about a few other options enough to say "no we haven't got that", and anything else would get a blank stare and a "is that a company's name?"
If you had put effort into your search and optimized the selection for your specific needs, you were much more likely to find the product online - the physical stores often forced you into a choice between different suboptimal products.
I think there’s lots of factors going on here too. Products were less often considered disposable two or three generations ago. A manufacturer wouldn’t offer 6 versions of nearly the same thing to capture all price points. Things used to be predominantly manufactured by hand, which also meant they were inspectable and repairable by hand. Manufacturing businesses typically kept less products on the market for longer periods (model numbers have become quarterly iterations or specific to a retailer). There’s now 50 options that appear identical for nearly every product when previously there might have been 5. It all contributes to it being difficult for staff to meaningfully “know” what’s being sold even if they wanted to, and businesses aren’t going to spend that time and money training employees on a product they won’t be selling in a month.
Salespeople nowadays are basically recruited from the same pool as Uber Eats delivery people. They don't care about what they sell, they just want to make it to the end of the month.
For the most part, why would I trust random employees at a store?
Knowledgable retail sales employees have completely vanished outside of niche "passionate enthusiast turned their hobby into a business". Homebrew shops, gun stores, marijuana dispensaries, comic and table top gaming stores, etc, but even many of those are plagued with the same cheap shit you can find on Alibaba or Amazon and a good chunk of the time if it's not the business owner you're dealing with you might as well skip asking questions. Outside of those niche interest stores there's often not even sales staff present, there are just people who stock shelves and operate the point of sale system but they don't even attempt to present themselves as knowledgable and can at best only point you to the right aisle of the store.
At this point in my life I've mostly given up asking employees questions. There's only "fishy" answers to be had in retail and there's not generally a competing store with more knowledgable employees. It seems like most of the time I can choose between bad and another brand of bad. Think Hobby Lobby vs. Michaels or Home Depot vs Lowes, Target vs. WalMart, Sams vs. Costco, Macy's vs. Dillards, Dicks vs. Academy Sports, a Ford dealer vs. a Toyota dealer, or worse they've consolidated operations like Bass Pro vs. Cabelas. There might be reasons to choose one over the other for reasons like employee welfare and return policies, but typically prices are all in line with each other and the retail staff are equally useless.
There's only a couple of nationwide exceptions that come to mind like REI and Microcenter but even then people might have to travel prohibitive distances to have those options and they might as well just buy online.
Small regional stores and mom n' pop operations trend towards having more passionate employees that might have an interest in the products (like a ski shop is generally only staffed by people who've at skied, bike shops tend to only be staffed by people who enjoy cycling, etc) but it's still pretty infrequent.
>> If the answers seem fishy, take your business somewhere else.
If you know enough to know whether or not the answers you might get are fishy, you probably already know more than the guy you are trying to get advice from.
Arguably, small mom & pop shops already started dying in large numbers when big box stores started taking over, and online shopping is continuing the small shop’s march to extinction. Globalization of commerce has only added to the margin pressures. Add a global pandemic for good measure, and it’s been a brutal few decades for small shops in increasingly many parts of the world.
Yeah but it is not a good experience, except for a few types of products. I needed a car jump starter so I tried going to AutoZone instead of Amazon. The only one AutoZone had was 3x what I could find on Amazon.
Most auto parts stores are terrible places these days with low quality parts at high prices, and staff that are just competent enough to check out your items.
It used to be (20-25 years ago) you could go in tell them what you were doing and they could tell you which brands to avoid, what other parts you might need, and any secrets that might help you get the job done faster or without having to remove quite as much stuff. These days, the people they hire are so incompetent if you asked them for Headlight Fluid they would take you over to the fluids aisle to look for it.
The Noco ones are decent, but the Clore Automotive Jump-N-Carry is the only thing approaching a BIFL (buy it for life) quality jump starter that I’m aware of. User-replaceable sealed lead acid battery like a quality UPS (which if you’re looking, grab an Eaton 5PX off eBay for a couple hundred bucks shipped…my 3 have outlasted half a dozen consumer APC junk units).
Lead acid batteries self-destruct after they've been left to discharge. Not something you want to keep in a trunk or store at home unplugged. The lithium jump starters have much more dependable passive storage life.
Uhhh, you can still do that, you know.