Comments on: Palm Opens Retail Store at Stanford Shopping Center

Palm would have been better off using the money to run adds in Business Week/Barrons/Forbes/whatever.

It may be a benefit to you, but not to Palm. The profit realized on battery products is incredibly small.

How often does one change a Palm battery? How many Palm units are sold per year? Even if every Palm user replaced their battery on a regular basis, the total amount of money to be made here is incredibly small.

Every square foot at Stanford shopping mall must generate an incredible amount of money each month just to break even and pay for that square foot. It is pretty easy to see why Palm should not be in the battery business.

I fail to see why these BASIC concepts that have long been crucial points (even taken for granted) in nearly every other piece of consumer tech (be it low-tech flashlights or high-tech cellphones/camcorders) seems to be ignored by Palm.

You know, Palm should appoint at least one Kirvin-style (No, I'm NOT joking here...not really) evangelist/fanboy zealot to man each Palm retail store. During peak retail hours, that individual could actually really do some good to educate the unwashed masses and probably even provide some unofficial tech support to the POS users who know just enough to be dangerous.

Seriously, it's not a half-bad concept.

1. R&D for new devices to invigorate the product line,
2. Improving the quality control process prior to a new device's launch
3. Writing patches for existing handhelds and improving the customer support experience--ie standing behind warranties & providing REAL support.
4. Buying parts of Palm OS from Access and doing a proper update for Cobalt/Garnet since PoL is still a pipedream
5. Improving their non-retail marketing (print literature, ads, building up the Treo brand etc).

I've yet to visit a Palm retail store and I cannot imagine there are too many compelling reasons for anyone to go out of their way to visit such a store. At the very least, they should have exclusive in-store specials or offers (trade in your old handheld at ANY Palm retail store for $50 off instantly?) or a Genius Bar concept ala Apple.

I've checked out several of the Palm kiosks in various malls of the Bay Area and am shocked at how little they have or know about the products. The salespeople seem to be straight out of college and new Palm users themselves. They advertise about 1/3rd of the Palm products the local CompUSA carries. And they are out of stock on nearly anything you ask about anyway. Complete waste of time, but I keep going back in futile hope that they might carry SOMETHING I'm interested in and haven't seen... This is in Palm's home turf and they can't get it right - imagine how terrible it is across the country.

These flashy locations COULD be useful if only they'd display AND STOCK a decent inventory of the creative peripherals, cases, software, etc. that make their half-a%%ed efforts at PDAs and Smartphones worth the trouble of purchasing.

My last trip to one of these "stores" consisted of asking to see one of the 3 nice cases they display for the Treo 650, and having the sales dweeb NOT EVEN LET ME TRY THE DEMO CASE because they were "out of stock." Nice way to treat someone who has obviously purchased at least ONE of your $600.00 devices, idiots. I guess taking 2 minutes (when he wasn't serving anyone anyway...) to let me TRY the case wasn't worth it if he couldn't IMMEDIATELY make even more money off my stupidity of continuing to purchase Palm...

Whenever I try believing that Palm isn't working diligently to wreck whatever chances it has to survive as a company, it seems to go out of it's way to prove me wrong. I'm going to check out the Stanford store just to see if the "sales" people are as ridiculously arrogant and ill-trained as their San Francisco and Sunnyvale stores.

If these stores are a "billboard" for Palm, then staffing them with commission-hungry, ill-informed sales drones is a perfect way to alienate the rest of the Palm customers that haven't already dumped them. I have ONE Apple product - a dumb little iPod - but when I walk into their stores they have a myrid of products, OEM and third-party accessories to try, (mostly) informed and helpful staff that wants to meet MY needs, NOT figure out how I can enrich their monthly commission or ignore me. I silently smirk at all the people "ooh-ing" and "aaah-ing" over all the silly Apple trinkets, but nearly every time I leave one of their stores it's with the information, product or experience that I came to get.

When I visit a Palm kiosk, it's mostly all the same handhelds I can see in any Office Depot, combined with a few out-of-stock third-party applications and several accessories for EOL handhelds they no longer sell but haven't had the time to remove from their tiny countertop case. Blah.

Frankly, Palm's kiosks have been so laughingly terrible and the antithesis of Apple's method of doing a company store that I am shocked and amazed every time Palm announces they are opening another one. I guess that's why it shows up as "news" in the forums.

Surur

All retail stores have issues with commission--if you pay sales people too much then the sales staff will treat people like objects and only show interest if the customer is buying; if you pay too little then the sales staff will be lazy.

These are common technical retail problems and aren't Palm specific problems.

The mistake is creating a Palm retail store in the first place.

The employees aren't much better. The two times I've visited were today and a few days after the lifedrive was announced. On that visit, the sales rep didn't know anything about the lifedrive. Today's brainiac wasn't much better.