There's great hand-wringing on the Web these days and among computer industry executives about just how mainstream the digital culture will become, whether large numbers of people will ever spend lots of money online and why this hasn't happened yet.
For much of America, from enraged AOL users filing lawsuits, to people watching local news and newspaper stories about murder, rape, hate-mongering, child-snatching, addiction, bomb-making instructions, and perversion on the Net, to the vast bulk of citizens who have never set foot in cyberspace in any form, the Internet is still perceived as a dangerous, expensive, and frightening place.
In terms of public and customer relations, the computer industry is about on a par with drug traffickers.
And deservedly so. The digital industry might be the most arrogant and, in terms of dealing with the public, dysfunctional industry ever. It is hostile, self-destructive, expensive, confusing, and utterly disconnected from real people and their lives and problems. It batters its customers, abandons them, picks their pockets, confuses them, and then holds non-starter seminars on why there aren't more people online spending more money. No industry, from automakers to television manufacturers, or even to book publishers, has ever sold anything as incompetently and ineptly as computers are sold and serviced in America, or in so confused and difficult environment as the World Wide Web.
Anybody who wants proof of this should conduct the Media Rant Marketing Experiment in their own town.
For the experiment, I went to Bob Ciasulli's Toyota dealership and then to the Comp City outlet just across Route 46 in Totowa, New Jersey, to see what the difference was between buying a computer and a car, and whether that told us much about the online world, customers, and profit making.
I wasn't actually in the market to buy either a new car or a new computer on these visits (on my salary?), but the juxtaposition of the two retail outlets across the highway kept nagging at me whenever I drove by. Then it hit me. Both industries really do the same thing. They both selling expensive merchandise to a skeptical public. In my little charade and as your average buyer, I learned a lot.
At Bob Ciasulli's Toyota (whose unoriginal but sincere motto is: "Bad Credit? No Credit? No Problem?"), I walked into the showroom, and was met by Nick, who glided over before I was 10 feet inside the door. I wanted to buy a small sedan, I said. Did I want to sit down, asked Nick? Have a cuppa? I had Nick's full attention.
No thanks, I said, I wanted to drive a Toyota around. Five minutes later, Nick and I were cruising down Route 46 as he enthused about horsepower and reclining seats and explained how the dashboard worked, and asked about the wife and kid. I had a score of questions - mileage, brakes, airbags - and he answered every one thoughtfully and patiently, some more than once. We both loved yellow Labs, in turned out, and were trading pictures of our dogs, not our kids. I understood this was a hustle, but I appreciated it anyway. My feeling was that Nick would scalp me on the price if he could, but wouldn't sell me a bad car. I felt he'd be there if I had any troubles.
Ten minutes later, we were sitting at a table talking price, credit, and service. I could put some money down. Or none. I could use my bank, or Toyota would be only too happy to advance me some credit right there. Nobody, Nick said, leaves Bob Ciasulli's angry or without a car.
What do I have to do, asked Nick, to get you to drive a car out of here? Just tell me and I'll do it. What questions do you have? I'll sit here until I answer everyone of them. I've got all different colors and option packages. You tell me and you'll get it just the way you want it. A technician will show you what every button does. And I'll be here. You know where to find me.
Thirty minutes after I walked in, I had seen the car, driven it, had all my questions about it answered, knew the price, met the service manager and viewed the service bay, where I could bring it anytime with or without an appointment.
I had Nick's work and home numbers if I had any more questions. My credit had been approved while I waited, and had I wanted to buy the car, I could have driven it home right there. It was 40 minutes from the time I'd walked in.
It was a strange notion to me to feel warmly about a car salesman, but I liked Nick. I didn't know that within minutes, Nick would not only be a beloved hero to me, but a symbol of contrast with the computer industry and the way it interacts with humans.
"First point," Nick had told me. "I'm the first point of contact between you and the car. If the first point of contact is bad, then the whole thing turns sour."
The people running the computer industry should forget about writing hot new code and hire Nick at all costs. The industry would be turned around overnight, and the Web the world's biggest cash cow.
When I drove my old minivan across the highway to Comp City, I found a nightmare from start to finish. There was no Nick to greet me. There was nobody to greet me. Frantic, hurried, and exasperated customers rushed from aisle to aisle, trying to flag one of the handful of salespeople who were rushing from one end of the store to the other. Customers, in desperation, were asking one another questions: Do you use a Mac? Do you need a CD-ROM? What's RAM and how much do you need? What's the difference between a PC and a Power Mac? There were a few computer models on display, but only a few. Most of the computers had to be purchased blind, without any discussion or technical explanation. In many cases, computers couldn't be purchased at all, since many people in the store had to go back to work before they could find a salesperson.
One employee, a kid with a name tag was surrounded in the middle of an aisle. Another customer was volunteering to help panicked customers for free. He had a line with 10 people in it just trying to ask him where to find the computer models they wanted to see.
There were long lines by the cash registers, and longer lines by the Customer Service counter. One man carrying a Powerbook told me he had been in the store for an hour just trying to drop off his computer for repairs. First he had waited in the service line for 45 minutes, then he got a slip he had to take over to the cashier's line to put a deposit down for the repairs and where he waited for a half-hour, then he had to bring the slip back to the service counter (where he had to wait in line all over again) to get a receipt for the computer.
A transaction that would have taken 30 seconds in a vacuum-cleaner repair store had taken him all morning.
Angry and bewildered customers didn't know what computer models to look at or how to try them out. There was nobody to talk to about memory or hard drives or power or speed. I counted eight customers in the cashier's line who dropped their Zip Drives, software programs, and printer cartridges on the floor and left because they ran out of time or had become enraged. Even though two lines snaked so far back into the store you couldn't see their end, only two of the five registers were staffed.
A woman who had bought an IBM Thinkpad without a CD-ROM was startled to get home and found she had been given one with a CD-ROM, even though she hadn't paid for it. Wanting to do the right thing - the Thinkpad she'd been given was more expensive than the one she'd paid for - she had driven 20 miles to return it. She had been in the store for nearly an hour. She finally lost it and nearly tackled an assistant manager.
"Look," she said, "this is your fault, not mine. Take back this computer and give me the one I paid for. I'm missing work!" The assistant manager said he had four people ahead of her with emergencies, all of them late for work, and would try to help. Fifteen minutes later, he did, trading computers. But she had to take her new receipt to the end of the cashier's line before she could take her new computer out of the store.
"Is it always like this?" I asked the assistant manager.
He laughed. "This is nothing. Over the weekend we had to hire extra security."
To stop thieves, I asked?
"No," he said, "to protect us."
Lord, I thought. Her troubles haven't even begun. Wait till she tries to get an ISDN line. Or tries to get on AOL. Or makes it to the World Wide Web. Or gets on her first Tech Support 800 number. Or types in capital letters and gets her eyebrows flamed off.
Webheads and digital veterans often know enough to call computer warehouses and overnight their hardware and software. They know what they want, and how much memory and power they need.
But for most Americans, you really do have to see it before you buy it. This is the first point encounter with the digital world, and it's a nightmare - one that only gets worse and more expensive the deeper you get into personal computing and/or the Web and the Internet. Whatever its virtues and evils, American capitalism has developed a powerful culture of salesmanship that seems to have sailed right over the heads of the nerds, engineers, and smartypants who run the computer industry. Aside from the fact that's its an outrageously callous way to treat people, it's a shame. Because for many people, it shapes their view of the digital culture, which is a frightening, expensive, and profoundly confusing world. Which is elementally why so few middle-class Americans dare to go on it and spend money there.
No medium in history has ever tried to grow and prosper in this way. No sane industry would try.
