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Best and Worst: The Shopping Experience

Sites and Sounds

Best: Web

Worst: Retail

Shopping for a PC is a sensory experience that can be good, bad, or (on occasion) surreal. One of our undercover PC shoppers, Sofia Martinez of Austin, Texas, observes that CompUSA is "bright, clean, and stinks of plastics." The same could be said for the megastores, from cavernous Costco warehouses to raucous consumer electronics shops such as Best Buy. The bigger stores often cram systems together on shelves, and provide little information about them beyond the stickers on the sides of the machines. Visiting a store can even prove dangerous. Reporter Tom Spring's visit to a Costco in Massachusetts resembled Hitchcock's The Birds, as he dodged chickadees dive-bombing from the rafters.

Some retailers did offer a more comforting experience. The mom-and-pop Chicago Cyber Exchange, for instance, has "a coffeehouse feel with high ceilings and upbeat music," says undercover PC shopper Katharine Dvorak. And every Gateway Country store is like a mini-Ikea showroom, with workstations displayed to reflect different digital lifestyles.

By contrast, dealing with phone and Web-based vendors is much more sedate. Aside from differences in hold music and voice-mail menus, the phone-based merchants were nearly identical. But Web sites varied as widely as the retail outlets, from the uncluttered, well-organized sites of Dell, Gateway, and HP to the densely packed home page of Buy.com. Dell's site offers several handy features, including three ways to look at your system configuration (a page with drop-down menus for each component, a page that lists all your options at once, and a concise, printable summary page), as well as the ability to buy some of the items in your shopping cart but save others for later.

Unfortunately, Web shopping can be frustrating, too. Polywell's site, for example, contains more specs and acronyms than an engineering manual, making it a geek's paradise and a novice's nightmare. We found a bug in PC Connection's System Selector: Specify any hard disk size and only 10 percent of the vendor's desktops show up. (We notified the site of the error, but when we checked back more than a month later, it had yet to be fixed.) We also encountered temporary shopping cart glitches at both Gateway's and HP's sites. But minor annoyances aside, we still prefer the quiet, relatively pressure-free atmosphere of the Web.

Freedom of Choice

Best: Web

Worst: Retail

Retail outlets have historically offered the broadest selection of computer brands, but that's starting to change. The vast majority of desktops on store shelves bear the logos of Compaq and HP. Bigger chains, including CompUSA and Circuit City, carry some Sony and Apple computers, plus a smattering of older EMachines and MicronPC systems. Otherwise, nada.

The big Web- and phone-based merchants aren't much better. PC Connection and Buy.com offer a broader selection (including Acer, IBM, and NEC) than their brick-and-mortar rivals, but many of the systems have bare-bones features. At Buy.com, more than half the systems that met our criteria were out of stock. On the plus side, PC Connection provides a nifty chart that lets you compare specs side by side for up to five systems at a time.

Still, the Web takes this category hands down. It's the only channel that lets you easily compare a Dell PC, say, to a Gateway, a Compaq, or virtually any other PC. Even if you have to visit a dozen sites, it's a lot easier than schlepping from store to store, or calling half-a-dozen merchants.

Have It Your Way

Best: Web

Worst: Retail

If you're picky about the parts that go into your PC, you probably won't walk out of a retail store with the machine of your dreams. Most stores sell off-the-shelf systems as is--unless you buy a piece of hardware separately and have the store's service center install it the same day. But the retailers are starting to catch up to the flexibility of Web and phone vendors. Most chains feature "build-to-order" kiosks where you can custom-configure a Compaq and/or HP system and have it shipped to your home (shipping charges and taxes will likely apply). In most stores, it was the only way to get a PC with the graphics board we wanted.

But such kiosks offer no advantage over doing it yourself on the Web. At an Office Depot in Wilmington, North Carolina, a sales rep named Elton quickly realized that the system we wanted was not in his store, marched over to the Compaq kiosk, and configured a Presario 7000Z that matched our specs exactly. The price was $1394, plus shipping charge and sales tax ($65 and $87, respectively). Elton claimed customers get a better price through Office Depot's system than they can on the Web. But when we checked Compaq's site, we configured an identical Presario for the same base price.

Mom-and-pops and many phone-based vendors also build PCs to your specifications, but in both cases you're relying on the sales rep to present all your options.

In the realm of customization, the Web is king: You can see your options and browse the online aisles for as long as you like. But not all sites are equally flexible. At Polywell.com you can specify everything but the type of screws they use to put the PC together. But you can't order it online; the company takes orders only via phone. At Gateway.com, on the other hand, you can specify options like memory or hard drive size, but you have to pick a preselected combination package for the graphics board, sound card, and network interface card. Buy.com and PC Connection offer you no way to customize systems online. (PC Connection can custom-configure a system if you order by phone.)

Help Is Hard to Find

Best: Web

Worst: Retail

Talk to enough computer salespeople and you start to question whether Darwin was right. Some folks we talked to, like the sales reps on Dell's and HP's phone lines, really knew their stuff. We wonder how others survived high school.

For example, when shopper Tom Spring asked a sales rep at the CompUSA in Cambridge, Massachusetts, if he could control a PC with his cell phone, the rep swallowed the hook. Sure, he said, you could use it "kinda like a wireless mouse." Tom asked salespeople at other Boston-area stores whether that was true. It turns out that sales staffers at Staples and the local store PCs for Everyone also subscribe to the cell-phone-as-mouse theory.

But staffers in retail stores had no monopoly on ignorance and questionable advice. When Tom called PC Connection, he was put on hold nine times while sales rep Jennifer hunted down answers to his questions. "You can only think about so many things at the same time before your brain can't process things anymore," she said.

A call to Gateway's 800 number was answered, in Spanish, by a salesperson named Sirena. (During peak times, calls roll over to Gateway's bilingual sales line.) She explained that her name meant "little mermaid"--but was quickly in over her head. She had no idea what DSL was, and when we asked about the difference between Intel and AMD, she put us on hold to find out (her answer: Intel spends more on advertising).

At the opposite extreme was Polywell's Ivy, The Woman Who Knew Too Much. Hopelessly geeky, she tried to outfit us with a hard disk mirroring system for our home office, blithely tossed around acronyms like RAID and DDR, and never asked what we wanted to do with the computer or how much we wanted to spend.

How to escape less-than-helpful salespeople? Your best bet is to politely get off the phone (or out of the store) and try your luck with another rep. But you'll get more--and more accurate--sales information on the better Web sites. On Gateway's system configuration page, you can click a button to make windows appear that contain information about each component. Dell goes one better with its Desktop Buying Guide, full of easy-to-understand advice and a godsend for anyone lost in a sea of acronyms. Gateway's and HP's Web sites offer live chat with salespeople. Gateway even e-mails you the transcript shortly after you log off. Our results were mixed: One shopper found the live chat helpful, the other did not. Still, the future looks promising for this kind of sales assistance.

Your best solution may be the Web/phone combo plate: Do your shopping online to get the exact configuration you want, and then call to make the final purchase. That way you get a chance to haggle and ask questions, as well as a rep's name and extension in case something goes wrong with your order.

Try Before You Buy

Best: Retail

Worst: Web and Phone

Only retail stores let you kick a PC's tires--or check out its monitor, keyboard, and speakers--before you drive it away. The best place to test-drive a system is Gateway Country, which offers sleek workstations complete with printers, groovy-looking (if uncomfortable) stools, and even live Internet connections. In a pinch, you could probably use the store as a second office--at least until the salespeople became suspicious. Still, it's just a showroom: There's no way to walk home with your favorite PC, and it took about ten days for us to get the system we ordered from Gateway's retail store.

Meanwhile, at Costco, the computers can double as babysitters. At the store in Durham, North Carolina, we found a freckle-faced, 12-year-old boy--who had escaped from his parents--merrily playing backgammon on a MicronPC. Other stores are less inviting, however. CompUSA, Office Depot, and Staples do offer free access to their PCs. But at CompUSA, the computers and monitors sit on different shelves, making it hard to figure out which display to look at. At Best Buy, you can run only the demo program they've installed on every system. Circuit City password-protects its PCs. If you want to test-drive one, you must first talk to a rep. At the bottom of this heap: mom-and-pop shops, most of which had little if anything to look at, let alone try out.

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