Everything I Learned Selling Consumer Electronics

Tech Reviewers: Take Things In Isolation

The customer is always right

This is the first thing they tell you working in retail.

Anyone who has ever had to deal with a complaint will tell you how quickly this maxim falls apart.

You’ve been trained as the expert. How could they not trust your advice? You read all the magazines. Make sure you know your response time from your RAW processing. How can they be happy with something you didn’t recommend?

But it turns out that the customer is always right.

It can just take you time to realise it.

Ever since I was a kid I had been interested in tech. I used to ponder things other kids were never interested in. How did the Transformers even work? What powered Ulysses 31’s starship? How did some ancient civilisation create a giant solar powered condor? I hoped one day to have the talking computer from Pole Position.

I used to pull apart gadgets to see how they functioned. I wanted to know the secrets of how my favourite video games were built. I would spend hours typing code from a library book into my Vic-20 just for a few minutes of game time. I would kid myself that I had any engineering skills trying to build something James Bond might use out of spare Lego pieces.

Turning teen I went from building to reading. I would pour over every magazine I could buy. It didn’t matter if I…