[quote name='Dead of Knight']
Incidentally, my first computer was a Packard Bell too. How did they
ing sell when they were such pieces of shit? I blame my parents, as I was only in 3rd grade and it was an Xmas gift. I didn't have too much problems with mine though.[/quote]
Back in the early/ mid 90's, I worked electronics at OfficeMax (eventually made supervisor of the dept - whoop-dee-doo), and I remember how PB's sold really well. (I used to try to steer people toward the Compaqs, back when they were decent machines.) PB was one of the first systems to sell with a CD-Rom below $1000. I remember the Sunday that ad broke VERY well - I still have nightmares about it. We had six systems in stock, and sold them out within ten minutes. (Four of the six machines were returned defective - hard to believe, I know.)
For the rest of the day - and week - people were pissed because we sold out so quickly. I was accused of bait-and-switch, hoarding, you name it by bored soccer moms and angry dads. Even though the system said we had no more coming in, I started a call list just to keep my own sanity. It eventually got to be something like ten pages long. At that point, I even had to tell customers "Um, there are hundreds of people ahead of you, and we never get computers replenished more than 5 or 6 at a time." and customers were still like "Do you want me to tell your manager you don't want to make a sale?"
Thanks DoK...now I'm having retail flashbacks of that place, and all the stuff is just flooding back: the haggling, explaining to my manager why having a system on an endcap in the back of the store is a bad idea - only to have someone gut the RAM and cpu out days later, the day someone made a statement by loafing on the floor of my department, the day a customer physically assaulted my manager - I had to go to court for years after that...