They actually charged $75.00?


Around here you had delivery, set up, and they'd haul off the old RPTV for free.

Time spent loading, maybe an hour drive, unload, set up, clean up the packaging, load the old monster, then drive back to the store. All for free....

Maybe someone in the office thought they were still making money after all that?

Geek squad is their biggest hurdle.

The initial concept seemed to be to have people available to deliver so they could sell through product. Which was fine when there was margin in the products. Make money on product, give away the labor.

Now that there's no margin in the product, and they have established the concept of low cost/free delivery. They need to figure a way out of that practice. Now they need to figure out how to sell labor and give away product.

Trouble is, skilled labor isn't easy to find or cheap, and the typical corporate atmosphere makes it hard to keep the qualified people. Combined with the attitudes of you're paying me x and charge y, I'm better off working for myself. Or the opposite attitude of all you're paying me is x, this is all I'm going to do.

The reason the rest of us are still in business is because of our dedication and building relationships with customers. Our customers can call us and speak to the person who installed their gear, not get a run around by the corporate system.

There is no magic fix. Split off the squad, and you have no one to deliver/setup. Get rid of the product and you have nothing for the squad to do. Make the squad more direct with the customer and you overwhelm your work force and risk squad taking away your client base. And the negative publicity of one bad apple, how do you isolate against that?

The real winners here are the guys that sold the Geek Squad & Magnolia to Best Buy!