Staples: No We Don't Have That

What's Not Working At the Office Superstore

As a matter of routine, I'd much rather shop at a brick and mortar store, than online. I'll definitely research a product to death online, but when a purchase is made, I prefer a regular store. Perhaps it's actually being able to examine, hold, and choose the most pristine box. Maybe it's the attractive display with the competitor's products shown side by side. Or maybe it's the ease of which I can exchange or return the item when it doesn't work out as expected. In the end, maybe my impatience gets the better of me, and I simply don't want to wait for the item.

This week, I had the rare situation that I had some time to kill. I was at a local mall, and found myself browsing in a Staple's Office Superstore. I have left quite a few of my dollars over at the store with the “easy button” the last decade.

As I browsed through the shelves, and displays, I found little to impress me or anyone else. The few items out of the box on display were not functioning properly or even powered on. Also, quite a large percentage of the technology should have been relegated to the "bargain bin," and priced appropriately.

Looking at the handhelds was quite typical. On display were only Palms, and no Pocket PC's. There were also no smart phones, only pure handhelds. They did have a current Palm T/X, but they also had the outdated Palm E, and Zire 72. Also, the Palms were mixed in with a Creative Zen music player just to confuse everyone. While all the handhelds were plugged in for power, they could either not be turned on, or were frozen on one screen. This display did not encourage anyone to purchase anything. They would have been better off taking the whole thing down.

Bearing in mind that one display doesn't make or break a store, I headed up the next aisle. Ah, I spied hard drives, and headed over. I wanted to see what serial ATA (SATA) drives were on sale, and in what capacities. Recall that the SATA drives conform to the newer, faster standard than the older parallel ATA drives. Imagine my surprise when they had no SATA drives for sale in the store! They only offered a few parallel ATA drives, all from Maxtor. This was another weak section.

Up and down the aisles, the trend continued unabated. The optical drives were mostly outdated, and overpriced. Does anyone really want a 52x cd-rom, especially for $30? For that kind of cash, even budget users should install a combo drive (DVD/CDRW), but none were offered in the Staple's. The monitors out of the boxes were not displaying any image making it impossible to choose one. The printers were not setup to print a test page like they did years ago so we could assess print quality and speed firsthand. The mice, keyboards and other peripherals were mostly last year's offerings, or even older. There were only two desktops (both from HP), and one notebook (from Averatec) on display, and neither was even turned on. I doubt that any of this stuff would sell with any frequency.

Needless to say, I did not purchase anything. I'm sure my experience is not unique to Staple's. The last time I was in OfficeMax, the experience was quite similar. With the ever shortening product cycles, maybe the traditional retailers just can't stock their shelves with the latest stuff. At least the electronics retailers, like Best Buy and Circuit City have more of the latest products on hand, but they have lots of outdated merchandise as well.

Staple's needs to either update their shelves, and their pricing, or they'll go the way of Woolco and TSS. With the power of the internet, today's consumers are aware of the latest products, and will shop at the stores that can provide them. Ultimately, this does come down to "buyer beware." While I may go to Staple's for a package of copy paper, I'll be taking my electronics shopping elsewhere.

--Jonas