The Fall of My Local Computer Store

Article 02 - April 4, 2016

There’s this computer store where I live down the street. It’s not a terrible computer store. They do sell rigs, but not high-end. Most of the things they sell are Kindles, iPads, speaker systems, surge protectors, keyboards, USB controllers, flashlights, batteries, recording devices, hard drives, and server boxes.

Things for the common folk.

I have no need for any of these things. Arguably, my stuff are far more expensive and I won’t expect it in a store where they sell to a demographic I’m not part of.

Yet with this angle they are trying to sell, they really seem to struggle to get their marbles together. Foot traffic? There’s never a shortage. Every time I visit the store, there always are potential customers. But actual purchases? Not much.

You see why I’m using the term “potential”. That’s the keyword right there.

Maybe it’s the type of place I live in. People in this area aren’t really the super-keen-on-electric-devices kind of people. iPhone on hand, maybe an Apple Watch as a tiny bonus on their wrists, and that’s about it. As far as I know, all the actual computer-related, tech-savvy kind of stuff never leave their daily offices.

And those are often tasks that don’t need much skill: Spreadsheet organizing, document type-ups (like what I’m doing right now), maybe create a presentation or two to show off the quarterly results to the boss and beg he doesn’t fire himself. Nobody in the office, unless you’re part of IT, has to do PPPOE dial-up troubleshooting, ping the cloud servers regularly to make sure it doesn’t vanish with twelve-odd years of corporate history.

So the store turned to toys. Horribly-named-and-written cheap-plastic-crap ones.

Enter a game called “Jimmy the Mouse”, which is coincidentally the name of one of my tech friends, who has a passion for “chees”, and you have to use a chopstick-like thing to poke out mozzarella logs all the while avoiding Jimmy (I’m sorry) the fall. The package also includes the delightful warning by Jimmy: “Do not bother me, I would be angry trembling!”

Or venture into “Intelligent Car Model”, which is actually a construction crane that supposedly serve as a “Promotion of New Products” for some reason. Maybe “Penguin Trap” will amuse you, where the capital T in the logo resembles more of a J than it does a T, and “the one who makes the penguin fall of thewill [sic] lose the game”.

Yes, there is a double space where the word following “the” is supposed to be. I guess they’re trying to find the word for it, but they just forgot about it and shipped the turd anyway.

Not one toy exceeds $25. And while the kids love the “Try Me” demos they had, few actually bought them. It doesn’t take a genius to read beyond the discount percentages to know that sales hurt even after the low-ball way they’re handling their business right now.

Not even the children is interested.

I don’t wish them an early closure. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great place to look around after you finish that Uncle Jared’s footlong meatball submarine, but if they don’t find a way to turn things around, the rolling shutter is waiting for them at the front door.