bad naughty fry’s electronics

So, I went to Fry’s Electronics today because I had the “perfect storm” of running out of color ink and laser toner at the same time. And, for whatever reason, the inkjet, a 6-color Epson Stylus Photo R300, had all 6 inks running equally low. I always loathe buying the cartridges since it’s the one time where you know you’re getting fleeced and there’s really nothing you can do about it. Granted, if I was only buying one cartridge at a time, it wouldn’t be that bad. Of course, in my situation it ended up being $85 worth of ink.

Ouch.

I also really needed a toner for my laser printer (Samsung ML-1710) but I decided to wait since I didn’t feel like spending another $80 on that in the same purchase. Yeah, I’m crazy like that. I’ll probably end up buying it next week anyways and a single laser toner lasts a long time so it’s decent investment.

Ok, onto my Fry’s story. After placing my cartridges in my basket I decided to just wander through the store and look around for a bit. While looking at a display that had some Sony products presented, a Fry’s sales associate came up to me to ask me and the following transaction occurred:

Fry’s Sales Associate: Excuse me sir, may I help you find anything today?
Me: No thank you, I’m just browsing.

[Fry’s Sales Associate glances into my basket]

Fry’s Sales Associate: Sir, let me write you up for a sales quote on these items.

[Fry’s Sales Associate grabs my items out of the basket and starts heading towards a POS station]

Me: Um…yeah, that’s ok. Can I have the ink back?
Fry’s Sales Associate: It will only take a second.
Me: Well, you didn’t help me get those items… (I was irritated at this point because I knew what was going on)

[Fry’s Sales Associate pauses and quickly glances over at the supervisor at that both in the middle of the aisle]

Fry’s Sales Associate: Oh, ok.

[Fry’s Sales Associate puts my items back in the basket, I give him stink eye and walk away]

Seriously, are those Fry’s Sales Associates so pressured to ring up sales quotes that they’ll stoop so low? Mind you, I have no problem letting them do create a sales quote if they actually help me but it’s unethical and a waste of my time. I’m not big fans of these guys in the first place and it’s guys like this that maintains my low opinion of these folks.

Lastly, on my way out I stopped by the flash memory readers and noticed how these things are completely getting out of hand. I say a Sony one that claimed 17-in-1 and I was like “wow” are there that many memory types? Of course, I know better so I decided to see what’s up. It turns out that 9 of the 17 are Sony’s own various Memory Stick types. I won’t bother listing them but that’s completely lame. The other eight make sense as they represent each type of competing format. Not to be outdone, some generic brand had 56-in-1! Of course, they do the same thing except for every single format. Sheesh…it’s just getting completely out of hand and only serves to confuse your basic consumer. I guess they’re catering to the “more must be better mentality”. Maybe it’s just me but I would rather them just list the main memory types and on the back list the “sub types” for each of those. It makes for a more fair comparison…but it would make too much sense and thus no company in their right mind would do that.

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