No Faith: Best Buy, and My Search for a GPS

I’m in the middle of an interesting problem: a search for a GPS.  Before I go any further, let me say that my professional life depends on my GPS.  I sell health insurance and other financial services to people in their homes all over the state of Ohio.  Many of the people I see are not in big cities and I am usually at least 100 miles (161 km) away from my clients.  A great number of the towns I go to do not have more than one or two traffic lights, if that.  So getting to these peoples’ homes can be something of a challenge and without a GPS it would be considerably more difficult.  The GPS also gives me estimated arrival times, so if it looks like I might be a little late for an appointment, I can call my clients and let them know.

I got my first GPS back in February 2004, a Garmin Streetpilot 2610.  I purchased it when I was fairly new in the insurance business and I quickly discovered that using mapquest (remember them?) wouldn’t work in some of these towns because if you miss a street sign, the only indication you missed it would be the next street sign, some two miles (3.5 km) down the road.  The unit cost me something like $400 back then and I have gotten so much value out of it, that they could have charged me thousands of dollars back then and I still would have gotten value out of it.  That Streetpilot is by far, the most important, the most used, and the most valued piece of tech I think I have ever owned.  And this is coming from a guy who owns an iPhone and a Tivo.

Well, time marches on and so does my Streetpilot.  It still works just fine, but I believe it is time to upgrade.  My partner has a Tom Tom of some type and it has some features to it that would be valuable.  As I cruise through tech blogs, I also note some other useful services that are available to other GPS users that would be of value to me when I’m in a strange city (which is almost every working day).  So I decide it is time to do the ol’ family pass-on of the Streetpilot to my wife and search out a new GPS.  I do some fairly dilligent research and come up with the GPS I felt was a winner: the Dash Express GPS!  Reviews went from stellar to poor.  But from what I read, the general consensus in terms of poor reviews was: large and bulky (I don’t care), expensive service (necessary business expense for me), and poor routing.  I admit to having concerns about that one.  I generally don’t give more than a casual glance to positive reviews.  I want to hear about the problems and see if I want to take that risk.  After thinking on it for months, I decided the feature set in the Dash outweighed possible routing problems and I bought it the last week of October.

I love it!  The routing problems?  NON-EXISTENT!  OK sure, I will admit that if you were a native of a city and the GPS takes you a way that you know, in your forty years of living in that city, to be long and inefficient, then sure, there might be problems.  But what the hell are you using a GPS for in a town you’ve lived in for all your life?  For a guy like me that’s coming into your town for the day and needs to find a residence, it serves its purpose fantastically.  The internet-enabled services and features are terriffic, a much improved upgrade to my stalwart Garmin Streetpilot.

Everything goes great for the two and a half weeks that I have it until I see this message on the official Dash Express blog:

“We’ve made the difficult, yet exciting, decision to shift gears to focus our company on extending the Dash experience to a variety of devices and platforms. Rather than continue to ship our own hardware, we’ll be licensing our application and service to a diverse group of device manufacturers……..”

The reason I got into the health insurance field in the first place is the company I worked for went out of business.  They called it “restructuring” at first.  It was “restructuring” for twelve hours before I went in to one of my stores on a Monday morning and the front doors were boarded up–literally!  So you can imagine how I feel here about Dash and its long term prospects.  It is a phenomenal GPS.  I love it!  It is, in fact everything I am looking for in a GPS!

On Monday I’m sending it back to Amazon, where I purchased it.

One of the benefits of this GPS is accurate arrival times, as more Dash users are on the road, the machine recalculates the time necessary to get to the appointment based on driving conditions of other Dash users.  No new users, no better time.  I recognized it wasn’t 100% accurate, and that being an early adopter I was taking a chance, and as more people bought a Dash, the better it would get.  But that isn’t happening anymore.  So my search for the pefect GPS goes on.

Today, I walked into Best Buy.  In my city, you don’t have a whole lot of retailers to choose from.  And with my town’s Circuit City being one of the 155 being shut down, all that’s left is Best Buy and Wal-Mart.  So I thought rather than continue my GPS search on the internet, I’d try a little human interaction.  So off to Best Buy I go.

I go in and walk over to the GPS section and start looking.  Best Buy is an interesting place to shop for things.  When you need help, you can never find a person.  When you don’t need any help, they’re all over you like Venom on Spider-Man.  So I’m looking at all the available GPS’s they have on display when one of their reps comes over and asks me if I need any help.  I tell him what I’m looking for, emphasizing that a quality GPS is extremely important to me along with my laundry list of features that I want.  He starts walking me around some of the units and really doesn’t do anything more than read the features off the labels to me.

One of the GPS’s catch my eye: the Insignia NS-CNV20.  This GPS is almost identical to my beloved Dash Express.  I didn’t even see this one on my internet search for GPS’s.  While I start to wonder how I missed it, I begin reading the unit’s box while listening to the salesguy talk it up.  On the bottom of the box, it says “Insignia, a division of Best Buy Inc.”  Well, that explains it.  But I think, OK, well I hardly think Best Buy is going down anytime soon, this might be a safe bet, but I still want to research this some more.  So I begin asking our friendly neighborhood sales bumpkin some more questions.  There were two questions and their respective answers that stick out in my mind:

Q:  “How much is the internet service that goes along with the device?”

A: “Well, the first year is free.”

Q: “Will map updates be a part of the service or a seperate charge after the trial period is over?”

A: “You don’t have to worry about it the first year, it is included.”

I asked these two questions about half a dozen times before I finally said, “my current GPS is almost five years old, I don’t really care about the first year of service, I want to know how much this will cost me after that.”  He finally told me: yes, map updates are included, and the service is $99 a year.  Why was that so difficult?  He probably thought I was a real dick at that point so he found an excuse to help someone else, which was just fine with me, and I could continue looking at GPS’s unencumbered.  I don’t answer around people’s questions when I’m selling, I don’t expect people to do that to me.  I know it is a sales tool dating back to the age of dinosaurs, but as far as I’m concerned, if someone asks me a straight question, then that is a concern and it deserves a straight answer.

I left a few minutes later and as I was going back home, I got to thinking about that Insignia.  It does everything the Dash did and is even a couple of bucks cheaper.  When there are updates, the sales idiot said I could do it over the air for small ones, or go into the Geek Squad for large ones.  Didn’t quite understand why I needed to do that.  I probably know as much about computers and electronics as a lot of those Geek Squad guys.  I’ve been by their counters several times and heard them give some pretty bad advice over the years, so I’m not sure why I would want to give them something as valuable to me as my GPS.  But that’s not what I realized as I was thinking about this.

What I realized is: I don’t trust Best Buy!  There!  I said it!  It feels good to get that off my chest.  I don’t trust Best Buy!

I just came to this realization tonight, so I’m still trying to work out my reasons, but I think I have a few.

• Their sales dunces know as much about the products they are selling as I do.  Maybe even less so.  The guy today was reading the features off the tag.  I can do that.  What am I, an idiot?
• I haven’t heard them do it lately, but I remember they used to do this.  When they asked me if I needed help and I said no, they responded by saying, “OK, but if you need anything, give us a holler, we don’t work on commission.”  As a commission-paid salesperson myself, I find that horribly offensive.  That means you have no monetary incentive to produce a satisfied customer.  “Buy, don’t buy, I don’t give a shit.  I’ll still make my $8.00/hr.”  Yeah, I know about the stereotype about commission based sales people “only wanting to make a sale.”  You can believe me or not, but from what I’ve seen, those guys don’t usually last in the selling field for a year.  The good ones care and will be honest with you.  Why?  Because if we get a pissed off client, they usually return the item and we have to pay the money back.  That hurts us more, because oftentimes that money has already been spent.  Think about it.  We’ll discuss this further on a future blog post.
• I’ve returned more items to Best Buy due to dishonesty about how its been sold than I have from any other retailer.
• The only reason I ever go to Best Buy is to get my hands on an item.  Usually, I buy my stuff at a company like Amazon.  Prices are lower, I don’t get harangued by sales klods, and they post the blurbs from the box also.  But at Best Buy I can see what it is I’m getting.  I thought I liked that.
• Their sales personnel are seasonal help.  Why the fuck do I think the temp help knows anything about this shit?

I feel there are more reasons why I don’t trust Best Buy, but these are the ones that come to my mind right now.  In case you can’t figure it out, that means I will not be buying the Insignia GPS.  So my search for a good GPS continues.  As I think back to my Best Buy purchases, I realize that what I’ve bought from them in the past are small items and things when I already knew what I wanted.  I haven’t actually shopped for an item and bought it from them for a long time.  I guess if they had any competition in my city, I wouldn’t go there ever again.  Because when you don’t have faith in the person selling you a product, you won’t buy from them.  Even if they don’t work on commission.