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dick-richardson
Member

Registered: Oct 2000
Location: Aberdeen, SD
Posts: 2531

quote:
Originally posted by Traveliter
Dagnabit!! You'd think I would think of these in advance so I wouldn't have to post these separately... sorry!

Just edit your original post and add on to the bottom. We'll get it.

I refuse to buy anything from Wal-Mart. I've had terrible experiences with customer service, their returns dept., and the incompetence of the staff (not on anything technical, but on questions like, "where's the bathroom?" or "who's your supervisor?") I do think it was a good corporate move on Handspring's part to include Wal-Mart, it just doesn't sit right to have a great product being sold the way Wal-Mart does.

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Abortion: Darwinism at its finest.

01-22-2001 06:14 AM

bkbk
Member

Registered: Jun 2000
Location:
Posts: 594

Originally posted by Traveliter"
"Dagnabit!!"
I'm pretty sure you spelled this wrong, and it either has 2 b's, 2 t's or 3 !!!s. Hold on, let me reach for my comic book lexicon ...

Anyway ... I hear M$ is looking to branch out w/the PktPC to more retail stores, too -- 1st one's Tiffany's!
(jk)

[Edited by bkbk on 01-22-2001 at 06:50 PM]

01-22-2001 11:48 PM

linuxppcguy
Member

Registered: Jul 2000
Location: Beverly, MA
Posts: 125

quote:
Originally posted by JHromadka
Why not? Where are you going to buy that Prism recharger at 2 in the morning when you're battery's almost dead? It's easier to find a Wal-mart than a Best Buy or CompUSA.

To answer your first question directly: Staples. There is a 24-hour Staples about a 15 minute drive from me. It's a tad farther away than Wal-Mart, but then again, the Wal-Mart here closes at 10 p.m. (as do most other retail stores in the metro Boston region...) Anyway, when I need to buy something like that during the day, I just go to the CompUSA/Staples/BestBuy megaplex which is about 1/2 the distance from me as the other Staples or Wal-Mart.

That being said, however, I see nothing wrong with selling the Visor at Wal-Mart. I mean, it's nice and all to have this cool 'geek-chic' item all to your self for a while, but I can't count how many times I've thought, "gosh, I wish all my friends had one of these..." I don't think they will, until the Visor spreads out into these markets. It's not something that should be limited to geeks. Yeah, our toys are cool... but give the other kids a chance to play with them.

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01-23-2001 05:53 AM

JHromadka
VisorCentral Staff

Registered: Sep 1999
Location: Texan in Calgary for a while
Posts: 1361

Well we don't have any Staples in Houston that I know of, but yesterday we went shopping at Wal-Mart and I couldn't find any Visor items at the one at Dunvale and Westheimer.

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James Hromadka
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01-23-2001 03:48 PM

Traveliter
Member

Registered: Jan 2000
Location:
Posts: 100

homer grumbled: "Ugh. Walmart? What is Handspring thinking? Don't they realize part of the appeal of the Visor is it's 'geek-chic' feel?"

Sorry homer -- based on the Visor presentation at MacWorld Expo as well as Donna Dubinsky personally, Visor is indeed selling at Wal-Mart now. This is a purposeful move by Handspring to try to expand the user market.

Although you might pooh-pooh Wal-Mart, geek-chic will only make so much money when you are only selling your products at $148 per unit retail (2Mb Solo). By selling through discount stores, you are talking about moving tens of millions in the same time you would otherwise sell a couple million units.

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01-23-2001 09:19 PM

Traveliter
Member

Registered: Jan 2000
Location:
Posts: 100

JHromadka noted: "Well we don't have any Staples in Houston that I know of, but yesterday we went shopping at Wal-Mart and I couldn't find any Visor items at the one at Dunvale and Westheimer. "

James -- My impressions have been that Handspring has been scrambling to try to get the distribution points opened up (read: get as many stores to carry Visors) as quickly as possible). But when you are talking about a brand new company with a brand new product, which it is trying to sell in retail chains at the same time it is scrambling to keep up with demand from its traditional markets... well, you can expect the process to take a while. You're talking a whole new retail sales division within Handspring that has to have all of the various management layers in place, etc.

If it means anything to you, the Wal-Mart in Fremont (SF Bay Area) don't got none, either.

01-23-2001 09:24 PM

Maltair
Member

Registered: Mar 2000
Location: Oregon
Posts: 115

Saw them at target yesterday

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01-29-2001 07:16 AM

bkbk
Member

Registered: Jun 2000
Location:
Posts: 594

I just read a stat (on my daily AvantGo, I think) that only 2% or 3% of all 'Net users buy online.
(I know, seems awfully low, but ok.)
And to equal 1,000,000 units (like a Wal-Mart can move) you'd have to have 1,000 users buy from your site every day for 3 yrs.
So ... maybe HS has a good sense of what it's doing...

01-31-2001 04:24 PM

pixelator
Member

Registered: Nov 2000
Location:
Posts: 46

What's with some of you Visor people? You're as bad as Mac Fanatics... First you're upset that Handspring isn't well supported in the marketplace (before the Visor was available outside of the Handspring website), and now that it's gaining broad acceptence and popularity, you're bemoaning the pedestrian atmosphere Wal-Mart and Target lend the brand. How ridiculous.

Tell me, would it bother you to buy a discounted pair of great shoes at a cut-rate place like Ross? I don't know if you all have Ross clothing outlets around you, but I found a pair of low-top Dr. Martens black leather shoes at one a few months back for $29.99, down from $99.99 at Macy's. Did I cluck my tongue at that and say "What's the world coming to? Dr. Martens at ROSS?" ...No, I was happy to find the things.

Trust me, it's not going to hurt you, Handspring or the Visor to have some stuff available through Target, Wal-Mart or McDonald's, even if they start giving the things away in Happy Meals.

b

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02-03-2001 08:18 AM

dick-richardson
Member

Registered: Oct 2000
Location: Aberdeen, SD
Posts: 2531

pixelator, I think you're taking comments made in jest a bit too seriously. Relax. Let your hair out. This is VC. Good deal on the shoes, by the way.

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Abortion: Darwinism at its finest.

02-03-2001 09:49 AM

laird
Member

Registered: Dec 2000
Location: mountain view, ca
Posts: 36

wal-mart sucks

Wal-Mart intentionally targets small towns for their boxes and then drives small shops out of business. Most of their products are of substandard quality and what is the same as products you buy in other stores is not substantially lower in price except when they are calling your attention to it as a loss leader.

Leading the charge in turning small town folks into minimum wage earners and burying us under a mountain of products that are so substandard that you need to replace them four times as often and fill up the landfills.

Welcome to white trashville.

feh, shop where you like.

02-07-2001 09:15 AM

Morris
Member

Registered: Jul 2000
Location: Indiana
Posts: 84

Re: wal-mart sucks

quote:
laird whined:
Wal-Mart intentionally targets small towns for their boxes and then drives small shops out of business. Most of their products are of substandard quality and what is the same as products you buy in other stores is not substantially lower in price except when they are calling your attention to it as a loss leader.

Leading the charge in turning small town folks into minimum wage earners and burying us under a mountain of products that are so substandard that you need to replace them four times as often and fill up the landfills.

----------------

Ah, the answer of the unenlightened. I was waiting for this to pop up in this thread.

Let's face it, Wal-Mart is a fantastic vehicle for getting Handspring products into users' hands - in mass quantities, all over America. This proves that Handspring is no longer a boutique item and that the company might have more staying power than you average dot-com. And Wal-Mart is an American company, by the way - it's not like we're subsidizing some foreign firm.

If you're so upset about the cavalcade of social issues that Wal-Mart and Wal-Mart alone causes (Wal-Mart, the official scapegoat for global warming, high blood pressure, and aluminum pop-top cans that don't open properly), why not just buy stock? At least you would profit a little from the disaster they allegedly cause.

02-08-2001 05:25 PM

laird
Member

Registered: Dec 2000
Location: mountain view, ca
Posts: 36

quote:
Ah, the answer of the unenlightened. I was waiting for this to pop up in this thread.

I'm surprised that you would call me unenlightened without knowing anything about my background. Your waiting implies a deep seated need to insult and regurgitate contrarianism instead of actually refuting a single point of mine.

quote:
And Wal-Mart is an American company, by the way - it's not like we're subsidizing some foreign firm.

As if that matters. The velocity of currency in a small down is extremely vital to the economy and Wal-Mart very sucessfully moves large quantities of it out of the small town where I grew up.

quote:
If you're so upset about the cavalcade of social issues that Wal-Mart and Wal-Mart alone causes (Wal-Mart, the official scapegoat for global warming, high blood pressure, and aluminum pop-top cans that don't open properly), why not just buy stock? At least you would profit a little from the disaster they allegedly cause.

Jeez, your post is such obvious flame bait. Whatever...

02-09-2001 01:56 AM

dick-richardson
Member

Registered: Oct 2000
Location: Aberdeen, SD
Posts: 2531

If one has to like Wal-Mart to be enlightened we're in sorry shape.

__________________
-Joshua
Abortion: Darwinism at its finest.

02-09-2001 05:17 AM

bacalao45
Member

Registered: Jan 2001
Location: Oregon
Posts: 24

Just the obvious.

The more places that sell Visors, the better it is for everyone. Quit whining.

Mark

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02-09-2001 07:51 AM

dick-richardson
Member

Registered: Oct 2000
Location: Aberdeen, SD
Posts: 2531

Re: Just the obvious.

quote:
Originally posted by bacalao45
The more places that sell Visors, the better it is for everyone. Quite whining.

The better it is for visor users. Pointing out a distinction between a visor user and a small town resident is not whining. And there is a correlation between Wal-Mart openings and local business closings. I don't think they sell sub-standard products, but I've had plenty of trouble with the staff employed at ours. I won't shop there.

__________________
-Joshua
Abortion: Darwinism at its finest.

02-09-2001 05:41 PM

BobbyMike
Member

Registered: Dec 1999
Location: "Children are a gift from God, they are a reward"
Posts: 1049

How many of us actually live in a small town?
I do, my town has a couple of stop signs and no stores. The closest town with a store is twenty minutes away. The closest town with a computer retailer is 45 minutes away. I have seen what WalMarts can do for a small town and they can't destroy local economies. No single store can. Small stores go out of business for lots of reasons, not the least being that they can't offer deep discounts, only good service. Most people chose to save money (I know that is open to debate as to whether you actually save money shopping in a discount store since it appears people, including me, buy stuff they didn't intend to when they physically go to a discount store) rather than get service now- look at the fast food business!
Where I live there is only one WalMart close by (45 min.). There are actually more Home Depots around. There are only a few other lumber yards around (all owned by the same guy) and a few hardware stores (two local chains and one family owned tool mecca).
I support the local lumberyard because I know the owner and they deliver to me (they supplied the wood for my old house and barn) and I get nails screws and electric tools from Home Depot (cause their open at 10 PM) and I get hand tools from the family owned store (cause they have the best, most complete selection of hand tools I have ever seen and they are knowledgable!). I also mail order hard to find stuff.
Back to WalMart - out here the WalMarts, rightly or wrongly, serve as a type of town square- kinda like the malls do in more suburban areas- this is neither bad nor good, it simply is. The roles that Main Street serves in small towns must constantly change because the people in the towns are always changing. More and more people in small towns work somewhere else- because the local economy can't support them. The mills, factories, farms, etc. have closed down. That's time passing. Demonizing a company for profiting from change is not unusual, it's not right, but it is common.
The way to "save" a Main Street is not by crushing competition by stopping "StuffMart" from coming in- that's un-American, instead come up with something it can do/provide that "StuffMart" can't. Service would be a good start. Selection would be another thing to focus on.
WalMart is a good place to buy some stuff cause you can save money and they're open more hours than most stores.
WalMart is not a good place to get personal attention, get questions answered, or get a large selection of different models from different manufacturers.
"Nuff said.

(Wow, I'm pretty long winded for a country boy!)

xxxx's and oooo's
Michael

02-11-2001 03:03 AM

dick-richardson
Member

Registered: Oct 2000
Location: Aberdeen, SD
Posts: 2531

I'm not saying that Wal-Marts destroy small towns. I'm saying there is a correlation between a Wal-Mart opening and some local businesses closing. I can't find the stats, but if I do I'll post the link.

__________________
-Joshua
Abortion: Darwinism at its finest.

02-11-2001 04:01 PM

laird
Member

Registered: Dec 2000
Location: mountain view, ca
Posts: 36

quote:
Originally posted by BobbyMike
The mills, factories, farms, etc. have closed down. That's time passing. Demonizing a company for profiting from change is not unusual, it's not right, but it is common.
The way to "save" a Main Street is not by crushing competition by stopping "StuffMart" from coming in- that's un-American...

An interesting corrallary to draw is that of land use zoning. Zoning is essentially a restriction of type of use on property and is intended for reasons of civic planning.

For the same reason you don't zone a prison near a gradeschool, I would not zone a store above X sq. feet in a small town. I am not allowed to build a house on a hill that's been in my family for over 100yrs due to zoning. I'd consider that 'unamerican' but it's contextual with the zoning purpose.

Sprawl is bad land use. Wal-Marts are usually examples of sprawl. Small businesses often infill into older buildings and increase viability of downtown areas.

I personally know of two cases in which a Wal-Mart was built by lining the pockets of the city council and aggreed to perform site upgrades such as intersections that they did not. In one case, they were obligated to construct an intersection at point X and instead decided to construct it 50ft. further down the hill which now causes the light to not be visible from the other side of the hill. On rainy days you can park in the Wal-Mart parking lot and watch the cars slide through the intersection and sometimes nail other cars.

The argument that Wal-Mart provides jobs to the small depressed towns is a fallacy due to the small businesses closures and the reduced velocity of local funds as they are siphoned out of the area.

02-16-2001 03:13 AM

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