High end vs internet

Emh, I'm trying to concentrate on imagining a high school auditorium hosting a high end set-up playing Eminem, but each time I get it fixed in my mind for an instant, something makes me wince in pain and I lose the thought, whereupon I immediately feel much better... ;^)

Emh - It's a nice thought, but surely you realize that the sound would be half of the problem.

I'm sidestepping the question, but just want to say that I have *never* had an all-around completely satisfactory experience in any shop. Some have been tolerable-to-okay, but none excellent. To one degree or another, all assistance I have ever received from even the most otherwise-pleasant shop salespeople and owners has suffered from a combination of ignorance, arrogance, and a placing of higher priority on *telling* the customer whatever their agenda might be, rather than *listening* to what the customer says first. Even with the least offending of them, I have always had to consciously maneuver around their shortcomings as salespeople in these areas in order to get what I want out of the encounter.

Flex, as a salesperson, I can tell you that this is a fundamental element of the job, and if you get tired of it, you need to leave the business, or else you will starve. I'm actually not a 'people-type' either, but that has no bearing on how I interact with customers. Doing the job professionally means helping people - anything less, and you're not doing your job. Any salesperson who takes the residue of one sales encounter into the next - or yesterday's questions, or last year's commissions - is unprofessional and will not ultimately succeed. Retail selling is not a particularly demanding job, but it does require some measure of mental fortitude and perspective to be exercised if you don't want to lose money. But at the end of the day, helping people well must be its own reward, and the commissions will take care of themselves. Salespeople who place blame for their failures instead of learning from them are constantly leaving any sales business, and since, as in baseball, you are destined to fail a large proportion of the time, the more quickly you understand this as a salesperson the better a chance you have of surviving. If the high end retail business is to survive, it needs to learn from its failures instead of blaming the internet.

Yes Trelja, you are correct that I was basically jes' funnin', even though my second comment about the sonics of Emh's proposal was directed toward the idea of setting up in an auditorium, not the music in question. Nothing would sound good enough played in that way to serve as a useful demonstration. I personally detest elitism in the arenas of system auditioning or dealer approval or same; although I wholeheartedly admit to being a zealous elitist when it comes to matters of taste in pop/rock music generally, people need to choose gear using the music they like to listen to. Of course, there is a large kernel of truth to the attitude that certain music is better than other music for system auditioning, at least as far as particular performance parameters go. This cuts all ways - loud rock can in some areas illuminate system performance better than classical, for instance. But not joking around, I actually would be against Emh's idea simply because I don't believe schools are an appropriate place to conduct marketing of businesses and products, and that we need less of this in our schools, not more. That said, as I think you already know I am in full agreement with you on your overall assessment of the way the high end markets, or fails to market, itself at the retail level.

Let me throw a random item out here: two of the high end stores in my general area not only don't feature any window displays or signage about what it is they carry (other than the store name), they have actively covered over their windows so that there is no way to see into the store except through the door. Not only does this waste an opportunity to attract or pique the interest of passersby (both on foot and in cars), but for those locals who aren't audiophiles who do get an inkling of what the shop sells, it creates an indelibly forbidding (not to mention just plain ugly) image that fairly screams to the commumity, "We don't want you, we don't care about you, we're not a part of you, don't bother us". What other retail business not located in an industrial park can you think of that would present a blank face to the world? At least Masonic halls have the good sense not to actually call attention to their shuttered secretiveness by locating in public shopping strips. Way to put the message in the world. If I owned a high end store in a trafficed area, I'd want total innocents wandering in to gawk every single day - I'd ensure that music playing could be heard outside the storefront, and change my window display often. What the hell do these dealers think they're hiding, and why? (Well, in one of the cases, they could be hiding the annoyingly blase - if they don't totally ignore you, that is - and arrogant 'service' awaiting within...)

No doubt. Last week I was speaking with a prominent LA area dealer/storeowner by phone about a well-known and -regarded 2-channel topline preamp from a leading manufacturer, and he regretted to say that in in 5 years of carrying this model, he's sold maybe 6 units so far. In contrast, an even more expensive pre/processor from the same company, that's only been in existence maybe half as long, he reckons he's sold over 40 of. You do the math...