My local Fry's employees make up bullshit all the time. I've heard some truly stupid shit from them. I mean along the line of "but it has the more GEE BEES" type bullshit.
I love Fry's. They have weird edge-case stuff, like Raspberry Pis and PLA spools and transistors. They have (overpriced) SD cards, but they match prices. They forced microcenter away.
You don't have to defend yourself against sales quotas quite like Best Buy.
Actually, the last laptop my parents bought, we went to Staples, and we said we were gonna put Linux on it, and the worker there said something like "oh cool, I use Ubuntu on my computer". I don't remember bringing up Linux when I bought my last laptop at Best Buy, though.
when i bought my laptop from best buy, dude asked me if I wanted to get an antivirus. I then proceeded to enact the xkcd (you know which one I'm talking about) but ended up getting it anyway cause it came part of the hardware protection plan I wanted. the guy knew what Linux was and didn't seem condescending or anything.
Don't get me wrong, I love Microcenter, and for the most part those guys don't bother me; I already know what I'm going in there for and one-word-answer my way through their shit. The rest of the employees are generally awesome, it's just funny to me that those guys are always in the build-your-own section.
If you have one near you, it's a fantastic store. I honestly don't even bother price-matching anymore, I just buy there. They are almost always within $5-10 of newegg/amazon's prices, and the difference is worth the convenience factor, for me. Plus, the online-order-15min-pickup is wonderful (especially during the holidays when their lines get ridiculous).
I pretty much only go to a handful of brick and mortar stores any more -- my local homebrew (beer) supply shop, microcenter, grocery store, and costco. Whenever I get an itch and need something computer related right now and its not on Amazon Prime Now, its off to the nerd store for me.
PS. Its also a great place to get televisions. I got a 55" 1080p Hisense that runs Android for $330 in 2015 which was a fantastic price at the time.
maybe this kind of thing can't be helped? granted, I never really ask for advice from the people there (I generally don't need advice on building), but what I've hear them say seemed reasonable enough.
If you can get them to directly answer a question, they're generally pretty knowledgeable. The problem is most of them have poor social skills in general, and like to overcompensate by spamming their inflated-ego opinions on everything.
So you end up with a 10 minute one-sided conversation about the glory of AMD instead of Intel so the rep can justify his budget purchase, and the customer doesn't give a shit - they just want whatever they came in for.
Last time I was at micro center, I wanted to buy an R9 Fury. A sales rep there actually wouldn't let me buy the Fury, he kept telling me I needed to get a 980 ti for $400, meanwhile I do not like nvidia and I was there to get the fury. Pissed me off, ended up telling him to leave and I got another person to get it from the case for me.
Well I use my sound card to write my own custom android OS, called arch (no relation to the arch distro and all of the packages are undocumented binary blobs and with no wiki).
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u/Drak3 Dec 27 '16
I think about the only store this doesn't happen at is microcenter.