This is why I shop online

Since my monitor is about four years old and nearing the end of its operational life, I went display-shopping today. The fact that the Elf got a new monitor for Christmas has nothing to do with it. I swear.

Most of my early shopping was done online, but I was having trouble. “I spend most of my day staring at small text,” I said to Elf. “I need a monitor that does a good job with that. No one reviews these based on how they display nine-point monospaced type.”

“Maybe you should go to Best Buy and look at some,” she said. “Not buy. Look. Then you can see your yourself.” That seemed like a reasonable suggestion, so off I went. And to maximize the potential, I added two other major chains in Christiansburg: Wal-Mart and Staples.

When it comes to technology, we’re not exactly spoiled for choice.

Anyway, Wal-Mart had precisely four monitors, each a different size and brand, and none of them were turned on or hooked up. The Wal-Mart experience compared to online: no reviews, no demonstrations, and greater chance of hitting slow-moving pedestrians in the parking lot.

Best Buy had a double-handful of monitors on the back wall, brightly lit by bare flourescent lightbulbs placed just a few inches above the screens. Hardly what I’d call ideal lighting for judging monitors. They were also showing a video demo rather than a computer interface, so there was no real way there to judge what the programing experience would be like on any of these. I have a really good idea of what an elephant’s skin looks like on AOC, Asus, Acer, Samsung, and LG monitors, but not 9pt Menlo.

Staples fell somewhere between the two with a measely selection of monitors that were at the very least on. They, too, were showing a video demo. But either the video demo was low-resolution or the monitors were not set to their native display resolutions, because all of them looked like crap. I think it was a native resolution problem, though, because the Norton Antivirus warning dialog box on all of them was freaking huge.

Overall, I have to say that shopping the brick-and-mortar stores was pretty frustrating. I had to find parking; I had to look online for reviews anyway, and at Best Buy I had to wait ten minutes for a stock-check on the one monitor I was interested in.

After all was said and done, I ended up ordering the Asus VE228H from Amazon for about fifty dollars less than the out-of-stock monitor I was interested in at Best Buy.

I’m also far less likely to go into any of these stores for a product I have to research; if the brick-and-mortars are going to compete with online sales, they’re going to have to figure out what it is you can do in person that you can’t online, then focus on that.