Best Buy's Geek Squad might be the worst thing to ever be | Hacker News Reader

Best Buy's Geek Squad might be the worst thing to ever be

kotaku.com

5 pointsdzlobin22 comments

Yes, it is a product for people who are less technically inclined than you are. Yes, it costs a lot of money. No, it is neither abusive nor irrational.

The typical customer of this is older than you are, and significantly wealthier. Many of them have home entertainment systems which cost a significant portion of my net worth. They have the (reasonable) expectation that their $20,000 toy is going to work when they get home, and they're willing to pay to make sure it does.

You could, incidentally, try selling things to these people, rather than to other twenty-somethings who are offended by the thought of paying money for things you could possibly get for free.

Excellent. Pretty sure that last graf is also why 37signals both succeeds and infuriates HN commenters.

Honestly, this isn't that bad. IMHO this isn't different than an car dealer charging $100+ for an oil change. There are people who can't/don't want to do it themselves, so it makes sense to pay someone else to do it. (Don't even talk about Jiffy Lube. I wouldn't take my enemy's rental to them.)

The folks here are mostly computer people, so we look at that and say "I could do that myself in 15 minutes!", but most people can't. Struggling with the potential wireless and firewall issues, TV format, resolution, audio formats, etc... can be frustrating and time consuming for lots of people.

Have you ever paid a plumber to replace a hot water heater or fix a burst pipe? The plumber goes home and thinks to himself "Man, I can't believe these people pay me $300 to replace a hot water heater! That's easy work!" when most people here don't have the tools or know-how to do it.

The thing is though that is relatively easy to google, so I don't think there are that many problems for those of us who frequent this place.

150$ after tax isn't too bad, so it would be worth spending a couple of hours reading up on how to do it and by the tools.

You have to look at it realistically. Yes, you can google it. But do you can your own vegetables at your house? You can google how to do that too, but do you? You can google how to fix your car, but do you do that? You can google how to build your own house, but you probably didn't do that either.

I'm not trying to single you out, just illustrate a point. People would rather pay someone else to do the labor. We are now a services industry. Our economy is now based on paying someone else to do the things you are too incompetent, lazy, or busy to do for yourself.

There's a perfectly valid reason why too: Technology is getting more complicated than the consumer can comprehend. Home networking, computer backups, cell phones, .. it's all a mess and eventually the people who are buying it just won't understand it.

It's good news for the geeks. The world is changing and more people are needing our services than there those of us who can satisfy them.

It's relatively easy to Google up instructions on filing basic legal forms, too. People still pay lawyers. A lot of simple auto repairs require nothing but basic tools and a trip to Pep Boys. People still pay shop rates to get it done.

The only reason we talk about this is because we're geeks and we'll never get it through our heads that keeping this information in-core is a net lose for most people.

You know, it just occurred to me: I have a flat-screen TV, an Onkyo receiver, a subwoofer, a center channel speaker and two different pairs of mains, two satellite surround speakers, an Xbox with svideo and/or component video and analog or toslink audio, a Wii which currently only has analog outs, an AT&T cable box with HDMI, svideo, and component video outs and toslink and analog audio outs, and a Macbook.

All of these components are in some way plugged in and working right now.

I would absolutely pay $130 to have someone come over and plug them in correctly.

For instance, I'm pretty sure 5.1 never works here.

I would absolutely rather spend 40 minutes commenting on HN than crawling around re-cabling my stereo system.

That's a fair point, and I agree. However, this would be a dream world if you expect geek squad to come over and fix everything correctly and quickly for $130. The service is notorious for charging quite a bit of money for just showing up to your house. That said, I can absolutely see them coming, having the same problem installing it that you would have had, and charging $300 for their service at that point.

Anyone who has a problem with this service should come over to my mow my yard for free. Since you must believe time has no value you wouldn't want me to pay the neighbor kid to do it for me would you? I must tell you my mower doesn't work very good so it's going to take a long time. If you want you can bring some tools over and fix the mower before you get started. I must insist you cover your own travel costs though because hey, I'm doing YOU a favor here by not paying someone to do this for me.

for an extra 130 bucks they will play the games for you too

Are you trying to say that debugging weird network problems with your PS3 is as fun as playing the game?

I'm not a gamer, I would definitely consider it more satisfying than playing a game.

Look at it positively: it opens up a market for people who want to charge a more reasonable amount for the same service ;) You're already doing your friend a favour by setting up his console, but now it's a favour worth $129...

Gone are the days when you purchased a console, plugged it into your TV, plugged the power in, put in a game and.. the game was ready to play. Total setup time: 2 minutes.

Now its plug power in, plug hdmi cable in, put in game, change input to hdmi 1 and play

that extra step = 130 bucks

No, because unlike 20 years ago with your SNES, your TV already has a DVD player, a cable box, and a DVR plugged into it, and your receiver has separate audio inputs and mappable digital inputs, and your SNES didn't care about whether you had a WEP key or a WPA PSK key.

[edit] and as pointed out below, your SNES didn't have to download updates or set up accounts. You plugged it in, and there was Punch Out.

Give me a break. There's absolutely no reason a dentist or attorney should have to bother with this stuff.

It takes a good 20 minutes to set up a brand new 360 after you've gone through all the configuration pages, set up gamertags, created a Live account, linked your Live account to your gamertag, created an avatar, downloaded essential system updates etc. That's before it will even read a game disc, let alone creating a second profile for your kids with restricted access. You can maybe half it by not connecting it to the internet, but there are still far too many steps.

The PS3 has fewer steps but they're hidden in obscure menus and the downloading takes at least 12 billion times as long.

I'm all for making technology easier for people who aren't savvy (which is most), but this crosses the line and takes MAJOR advantage of people. You could also argue, if you're dumb enough to pay for it, you deserve it. I don't believe that though.

It's for people who think that setting it up themselves would take more than $129 worth of time and/or frustration. There's nothing wrong with that.

I ran into a very odd networking issue with my XBox 360. A combination of it and my network setup led to the behavior that upon startup, the XBox would be unable to connect to XBox live. After quitting the game, loading up the network diagnostic tool, and running the network diagnostic, it would report everything as fine. Then I could go back to the dashboard or game and sign-in to XBox live with no problems, at least until I restarted the XBox.

Very frustrating. Turned out that for some odd reason (most likely something to do with my network), the XBox wouldn't pickup DNS settings over DHCP, until the network diagnostic tool ran. Setting the DNS servers manually solved it.

Is there ANY way my Uncle, Mom, Cousin, Nephew, neighbor, etc... could figure that out? Probably not. Would it be worth $129 for several of them to get that solved? yes.

I could see this being useful for people with short tempers and limited tech skills.

Not a very good article. Ill-informed, juvenile, short-sighted, and trite. Pandering to the masses instead of actually trying to understand or explain something.

Ugh.

Not pandering to the masses, pandering to juvenile hackers who hold non-techies in contempt.

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