How to sell (or not!) in the retail market

Theres been plenty of news about the release of Samsungs new LED TV with Yahoo widgets incuding a nice review by Walt :

http://solution.allthingsd.com/20090324/yahoo-widgets-lend-brains-to-boob-tube/

So all excited, I headed to the closest Best Buy to find out for myself what the fuss was all about - what a waste of time!

• As soon as I entered the TV show-room, I saw the three TVs prominently featured in the front: Samsung, Sony and LG.The Samsung model had a lot of details on the nature of LED etc. (breakthrough picture quality, eco-friendly design),  but nothing about Internet connectivity or Yahoo.

• I asked the store rep to show me Yahoo widgets - he had no idea what I was talking about. He went and got his boss, who then took me to the back of the show room for the TV with widgets (not all their LED TVs have widgets incidentally, and none of their LCD or Plasma TVs have it as yet).

• We then spend 15 mins looking for a remote to operate the TV.When the remote finally showed, he realized that the TV was not hooked up to the Internet - and no, he could not do me the favor of running a long Ethernet wire from the back office or setting up the TV via wifi (despite the TV being wifi ready. When I persisted, he said he did not have the right dongle for wifi).

• He did let me operate the offline widgets myself - the remote was terribly slow.  The widgets themselves had a nice design and they open up to use abt a quarter of the screen (you can also resize the video so you effectively get two screens).

• The widgets currently on deck were Yahoo services:  Flickr, news, weather, twitter etc. The store-rep claimed a 100 more widgets were in the works.
  

All in all - if  you ever have a product you want to sell retail, make sure you educate the store reps on how to sell it!