Gateway Had it commin' (Score 2, Insightful)

I worked for Gateway when they had all the retail stores. The only thing that helped us sell the pc's were the promise of US based tech support when the rest of the PC world sent it to India. That and the random Profile and Tablet computer sale helped. Honestly before they bought EMachines, Gateway was doing ok with the consumer electronics dept. as well. We sold TONS of their cheap plasmas before the rest of the market came down to their prices. Their number one source for cash flow was those stores. Not their most profitable source but the most sales. When they changed everything to go with retail outlets and the Emachines business model, everyone thought they went out of business. I didn't talk to a single person that knew that they still were selling computers. How can you recover from that? Their biggest asset was their customer base. Look at their stock come April 04'. That's when they closed their retail stores and it was all down hill from there. They did this to themselves, not the flopping PC industry.