Does CompUSA love Compaq?

THE INQUIRER HAS seen an internal Compaq document canvassing the views of US retail stores on the firm's products and the CompUSA part of the story shows Michael Capellas' firm still has to do a lot to convince Americans that the firm is wonderful.

There's a mixed bundle of answers from CompUSA staff, but the Mesquite branch reported that the 3835 is the number one selling Pocket PC there.

Maryland Heights CompUSA branch shut a couple of weeks back, so it had little comment to make, while the Bridgeton shop said that rebates on the computers helped bring quite a lot of traffic into the shop.

Gaithersburg CompUSA complained that there was a shortage of many of the Q accessories for the Ipaq, whil;e Dallas said that loyalty to Capellas was based on so-called "spiffs" and other promotions.

The Highland Park branch reckoned that its clearance shelf was doing OK, but Compaq's Intel Pentium 4 display was a plus.

Ipaqs were out of stock in Raleigh, but no enlightenment on the reason was provided, while the Naperville branch moaned that if people bought Ipaqs from the Q web site they paid no shipping but configuration to order meant shipping was incurred.

Downers Grove - were out of stock again, while the Manchester branch kept asking for a laptop Pentium 4.

The Mesa store complained there weren't enough Athlon Compaqs available. Wake up, AMD!

Some intelligent folk at the Phoenix branch of CompUSA asked about the HP takeover, and also wondered about Ipaq modems.

The people visiting Peoria wanted to know more about Ipaq accessories - like modems. When will they be available?

Toshiba is going great guns in Columbia, while Woburn reports that selling the Compaq 5420 is very hard - the integrated graphics card is the problem.

Rockville CompUSA wants more freebies from Compaq - and who can blame them?

Paramus had an interesting problem, with the mass observation survey revealing that SMC networking boxes look too similar to Compaq and placed next to each other. Note to Mike Capellas. Execute on this.

The good news in Fairfax is that 80 per cent of the shop has adopted Cyber Scholar, while in Deerfield Beach, the Ipaq 3765s are going down a storm.

Smyrna has an attitude problem with Compaq. Mike hasn't been in touch with them for too long.

Burbank is dead cheesed with Compaq too. A kiosk hasn't been working for two months now.

North Olmsted, like a few other stores, need spiff programmes to help them sell Compaq kit.

Bad news here. Woodbridge has replaced networking products from Compaq with Netgear and Linksys products.

Long Beach wants spiffs from Compaq too, while Plano says all PDAs are out of stock!

The 3765 is doing fantastically well in Lewisville.

Birmingham is very fed up with Compaq… µ

* INQBLOT A "spiff" is an incentive given to a sales person in a shop or at a distributor to actively promote one product over another. This can range from holidays in the Bahamas to packets of Scottish one pound notes, depending on the location. People wandering into the store may not realise that spiffs exist, so when they hear sales' spiels, may not be getting an absolutely unbiased views. Sales people work on commission and therefore like spiffs. Marketing people seem indifferent to such alluring thingies, while hacks are just gannets. µ