Dirty stinking lying conmen

I've seen those cable comparison displays in those stores. The last one I saw they had clearly set the brightness and colour setting of the "cheap" display very high to further degrade the picture quality.
 
The best one I ever saw was at my work when somebody ordered in a "super high gain wi-fi antenna" for about £100 :O
A week later it fell apart and turned out just to be a bit of coaxe cable with the core exposed!
the markup on that must have been about 10000%
 
Brookert said:
Yep, ex curry's employee here. The managers used to believe the BS they were given in the training sessions and so they used to push us to sell the belkin expensive cables.
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Ex comet employee here and it was the same where I use to work. Sadly put 6 years into the job before I finally moved on and decided to get more out of life. MONSTER cabling and "clean power" garbage was the daily speech we had to give to customers buying TV's and even PC's.

The £150 surge protector was a joke with the "clean power" gimmick as even the demonstration which had loose wiring on the "normal" plug and then the overpriced MONSTER gear was just daft. I tested a £15 belkin variant and had exactly the same result on a slow day, which wasn't to my surprise.

The markup on MONSTER gear is stupidly high, with the £100 cables having £90 profit on them. I was told this from a monster area managers own mouth.

The whole HDMI argument is daft as its digital, so you either have a 0 or a 1, aka a picture or no picture. The only time I'd ever entertain a slightly more expensive cable (still less than £15) would be if I was using a VERY long cable, which I didn't want to kink and bend, potentially breaking it.

I remember about 6 years ago now when a similar TV display was used in the store I worked at and it had composite cables set up properly on one side of the TV with the cheapest scart lead we could find (some proline thing) on the other side and the difference between those was massive, but not because of any sort of fair test, instead, simply because of how it was set up.
 
RomanNose said:
In dimples retirement, I bet he will just go around all the tech shops trolling them and then sacking every member of staff until they get tech literate ones. He will be known as the batman of Stoke.
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I'm cynical enough to think that the problem isn't lack of knowledge but lack of ethics on the part of the people running the businesses. It's just a more extreme form of upselling.
 
You know the worst part? We stopped selling Belkin cables and now make our own "premium" cables. The heads regularly come off the cables and they seem to be worse quality than our cheap cables, but with more shiny braiding on them. And I'm talking about the 90 quid ones, not just the 40 quid series.

I have to offer them first, but I don't argue if someone asks for the cheapo leads instead.
 
Just for the record, I seem to remember us being one of the first sites to raise the question about the price performance rip off of expensive HDMI cables.

Virtually everyone out there bought it, we called it as lies and gouging from day one.
 
ash_scotland88 said:
Don't know if it's been said, but surely it would also have to be identicle specced TV's too?
Many other facters can affect the quality of text.
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The TVs were the same but I couldn't tell what the source was.

atpbx said:
Just for the record, I seem to remember us being one of the first sites to raise the question about the price performance rip off of expensive HDMI cables.

Virtually everyone out there bought it, we called it as lies and gouging from day one.
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I'm a big fan of James Randi and it was probably on his site before anywhere else.
Still no-one has accepted his million dollar cable challenge.
 
I imagine very few employees of these retail giants actually know what half the stuff they're selling does.

Just because a PC costs £700, does not make it worth the money, especially when you buy it from the purple place (I fell into this trade a few years ago, £700 "gaming" pc, with a £40 graphics card)

A more expensive HDMI cable will be better, but the difference is hardly noticable between a cheap one and an expensive one unless you're after a really long cable, it still does not justify the cost.

I've got to the point now that, with the exception of external hard drives, I'll go into a shop, look at what product I'm interested in, then most of the time I'll buy it online, you don't get the uninformed salesmen trying to sell you the most expensive thing, you can read 100's of reviews detailing the positive and negative about it and 9/10 times its cheaper because the company isn't paying the uninformed salesmen to up-sell the more expensive version as "better"
 
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atpbx said:
Just for the record, I seem to remember us being one of the first sites to raise the question about the price performance rip off of expensive HDMI cables.

Virtually everyone out there bought it, we called it as lies and gouging from day one.
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Anyone who knows the difference between a digital and analogue signal should have known it was a scam from the beginning. It's just a shame that that is a very small minority and that it was allowed to perpetuate as it was for so long before more people became aware.

Of course I wouldn't be saying that if I worked for Monster Cables and had made a mint selling overpriced gear to people who know no better.
 
I bought my HDMI cable for £2.42 from a well know rainforest named website on the internet and couldnt be happier, I refused to pay 20 pounds plus for the same quality cable. If i break it ill buy another.
 
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Jay794 said:
I imagine very few employees of these retail giants actually know what half the stuff they're selling does.

Just because a PC costs £700, does not make it worth the money, especially when you buy it from the purple place (I fell into this trade a few years ago, £700 "gaming" pc, with a £40 graphics card)
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Not always the case, a job is a job when it comes down to it. If you're told to promote products XYZ, you're going to!

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A more expensive HDMI cable will be better, but the difference is hardly noticable between a cheap one and an expensive one unless you're after a really long cable, it still does not justify the cost.
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It won't be 'better', just less likely to break compared to a 50p jobbie
 
My dad bought a £50 HDMI the other day, he thought it was a bargain reduced from £80. I almost cried, and he won't take it back because he can't be bothered.
 
TommyV said:
Dimply you are one very defensive person.
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I think he's referring to the fact that one poster said I had been conned when I wasn't so I had to put him right and another poster who said he was surprised I'd gone back to see what con they were doing by looking up at the back of the TVs with a mirror.
I'm a very inquisitive person and virtually every item I buy I take apart so going back to a TV demo to see what scam they are performing is normal for me - I can't let things lie.
The thing is I now want to go back to the shop to see what the source for each TV is.
 
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