CR Electronics: Why electronics stores "suck"

How can brick-and-mortar consumer electronics stores serve customers better? Let Gilbert Fiorentino, an executive at Systemax (which now owns the Circuit City brand name), count the ways.
[ Photo courtesy of Ed Yourdon (Under Creative Commons) ]

The shopping experience at walk-in electronics stores "sucks," according to a keynote speech at the recent Consumer Electronics Association conference in New York.

No, that messenger wasn't me or someone else from Consumer Reports, talking about how our Ratings of places to buy computers and other major electronics items (available to subscribers) reveal that satisfaction with brick-and-mortar stores lags behind that for online retailers.

Instead, the observation came from someone with firsthand knowledge of electronics retailing: The relatively-new owner of CompUSA's stores and Web site and of the TigerDirect.com and newly-relaunched CircuitCity.com Web sites, too.

In the most colorful presentation at the CEA Line Shows event, Gilbert Fiorentino, the Chief Executive (Technology Products Group) of Systemax, the parent company for CompUSA, said he took over the ailing chain last year determined to improve the experience of shopping for electronics in a store.

"Go into a typical electronics store," he says, "and can you see the product manual? No. Can you find out how many HDMI inputs the TV set has? No, not unless it's on the little card on the shelf in front—and someone hasn't taken that for themselves. Can I even use the TV? No, someone stole the remote control, too."