#1. Apple is not a pleasant experience if you don't approximate the look of the Mac guy in the PC vs. Mac commercial. Anyone who doesn't fit the model customer and lifestyle is shunted aside in favor of the almighty pocketbook. #2. What qualifies any PC as a user device is its durability in my book. I can use a dozen different operating systems at once on a PC. I cannot do that on a mac without frying it like a crepe. #3. Yes there are still some of us that like to pay cash for things and not have to trek to the nearest drug store to pay a clerk to buy an internet capable debit card. Yes friends - if you are using your bank cards online you are in serious trouble. Trust no one. #4. Catalog shopping went out 100 years ago with good reason. Walmart came along. While we are bashing stores why don't we try this one. It literally censors the music on its shelves. Provides a limited selection of DVD's based on mass advertising kick backs and then claims to roll back the prices on them. While underpaying its single mothers and elderly greeters and stock keepers. #5. Circuit City deserves a better than fair share of the credit for bringing the PC culture to our region, regardless of its current status. People would be crying on their sofas without a place like Circuit City because - they did care to a degree about making it easy to order things by phone, internet, and in store, and had matching prices across all of those platforms. You can't say that for the Mail In Rebate stores like Best Buy who won't take your money when you are waving it in their face. #6. Bundling is another form of highway robbery. They will give you a printer and monitor, jack the price up and then price the item lower in the sale ad than is clearly printed on the shelf. So you get the newspaper - you walk into the store, and you end up walking out in a rage if you have any sense. Only the abjectly stupid would allow themselves to be duped by Best Buy's Notoriously horrible bait and switch tactics. #7. One more word about Apple. Apple if anyone is promoting closed source and DRM. What makes you want to drive people into their mall paradise of 3500.00 monitors is beyond me. Oh I forgot - that's a drop in the bucket to some people, its just keeping up with the Joneses. #8. A PC is not - surprisingly enough a toaster. They learned that when they couldn't sell them at Wal-Mart. Some pimpled clerk who wants to make up with the DVD addict girl that comes in every friday night at 3am isn't going to be able to keep his tongue in his mouth long enough to get a box out of a cabinet for anyone but his nuisance friends who buy the #399.00 lap top of the day before the store opens the next morning. #9. Why bother arguing this anymore. I have an opinion - you have an opinion. I think Circuit City should stay, you think it should go. Everybody has opinions. #10. Thou shall not covet thy neighbor's box.

I'll say it clearly, I shopped many times at the Amherst (Buffalo) Circuit City - 3 times in fact for PC's and paid Cash on the spot for top quality $500.00 computers. I have no problems with the PC's. I did not feel sharked by the staff, and I felt that they did not press me on things like CREDIT which is a big point with Mail In REBATE garbage stores like Best Buy who bait and switch on customers almost constantly. But then, I know what I am shopping for, and I am good at finding what I need in the computer department. As I stated above, this is just more proof that the American mentality is to buy the Mustang when all it needs is the Saturn ION.

I'm primarily disappointed because it gives us a limited choice of 1 for computer retail in Western New York, and the choice is unacceptable. I will pay higher prices at Office Depot or Office Max before EVER walking into a Best Buy as an alternate option. And as far as New Egg and Amazon and Ebay are concerned, for the foolhardy hobbyist with his own set of pliers and a screwdriver, I wish you all the best with your hard wasted money. Its all about what's in a $500.00 box and has nothing to do with all the shiny catalog entries. The problem is everyone thinks SOFT should necessarily be Free. If I could get a RELIABLE Linux Distro with RELIABLE Support, that isn't manned by all of those New Egg People, I might just buy that Linux Distro in a SOFTWARE store. Try Brick and Mortar. It was nice to have a car for a while there and have options. Unfortunately we are in a world where Less than competent service is traded for freedom in the market. Which is a poor excuse for a debilitating problem with the wholesale credibility of both the hardware and software industries. $500.00 box. End of story. They will always sell them in China.

This is more evidence that the American Consumer has no idea what it is spending its hard earned money on. People choose mediocrity over customer service in exchange for what they think is power. AMD64x2 is plenty capable for ALL internet applications today outside of games and what people really need to focus on like learning how to do e-commerce and pay their bills using computers. Every time I have shopped for a NEW computer at Circuit City - I have discovered the right computer in the right price range. $500.00 is the perfect price for any new pc. No more - no less, and it will handle 2 years of work for that price. 2 years down the road - you make a backup - turn it into a work server, and get a new one. Instead people would rather pay Best Buy inordinate amounts of gouging money to be lied to about Mail In Rebates and Big Screen TVs at the back of their Gigantic Warehouses, by know it all teenagers who have no interest in taking CASH from customers who literally walk in with fist fulls because they get commissions on signing people up for CREDIT. Having worked in Retail during the days of Tandy's bombed out Computer City I saw this all too well, and its going to happen again. Even Best Buy will fail. Then what do we throw in the leftover burnt out husks that used to be middle america? Rave parties? Stick it out Circuit City, prove to us that you are better with customers this Holiday Season, and we will shop in YOUR store.