Spring is in the air, and with it comes Spring Cleaning. While I was tidying up around the house I took the time to dig through my Obsolete Gear Closet. Here’s some of what I found, pictured above: ADS DA converter. An inexpensive (under $150 retail, if I recall) DA/AD converter, I had purchased it […]

A drum that gets beaten often in my columns and blog posts is on the importance of networking with related trades as a conduit for referral business. As you might expect, I typically point to the usual suspects when I talk about having connections: electricians, millworkers, HVAC guys and, of course, interior designers. But beyond those, […]

The other day Gary Kayye wrote a very on-point, insightful and rather harsh editorial about Samsung and LG’s pursuit of store-within-a-store experience centers in Best Buy. Gary makes a number of excellent points about how major CE brands aren’t failing because they aren’t doing retail like Apple does; they’re failing because their products aren’t well designed. The rush […]

In my time in the retail trenches I’ve seen things that are hilarious, tragic and just plain fraudulent. When it comes to salespeople making up their own compensation (i.e., commission fraud) I think that by now I’ve pretty much seen it all. Most of those efforts are petty and easily ferreted out. Some, like I’m […]

Innovation and competition are crucial to the development and adoption of technology, and I don’t want to sound like I’m arguing to the contrary. But both innovation and competition come at a cost, and that cost is that consumers have to face stupid, poorly thought out technologies. UltraViolet is one of those. Aside from being the […]

The world probably does not need yet another blog post about Apple, or any Apple products, such as Apple TV which I’m about to blog about. However, I feel compelled to do so, for two main reasons. The first is that I feel vaguely guilty spending my blogging time for rAVe telling old work stories that alternate […]

Way back in the day one of the places that I worked that was 100% commission had an unusual incentive in order to get hard-bitten, driven and cynical commission sales people to show up for things like product knowledge seminars, administrative duties, or anything else that took them off the floor: pay for Non-Productive Time. […]

We all have our vices, I suppose. It’s just that some people take them to work. I think I’ve mentioned in the past how much I loved being the only non-smoker on a sales floor. I used to work with a half-dozen other sales people, all of who had a serious nicotine problem. In addition […]

The nerd community media, by which I mean the social media sites that generate humorous pictures and the media sites that comment on social media and humorous pictures would have you believe that video game lovers are a nation divided; that somehow a line can be drawn between “serious” or “real” gamers and so-called “casual” […]

We’ve all got passions in our life, the things that make life worth living. At least, I know I do, and I hope that you do as well. One of my passions is the AV business, as I’m sure you’re aware, since I blog and tweet about it pretty much constantly. What you might not […]

As much fun as I have writing (and, apparently, as much fun as some of you have reading) my blog posts that reminisce about my experiences with employees who behaved badly, it’s important to remember that these are human beings we’re talking about. None of us are perfect, we all have our faults. It’s just […]

Prior to CES I can tell that it’s coming, with the increased volume of press releases spamming my inbox. During CES, the spam reaches a fever pitch, and after, I feel what can only be described as “numb” to the barrage of PR flacks clamoring for attention. What I’m especially tired of is PR people bragging about how […]

(Click for full-size comic) Just last week the cartoon posted above was making the rounds through my corner of Facebook. Why it’s funny is because, obviously, music listeners seldom know what they’re missing. I don’t mean to single out audio. But in the case of both audio and video do people really know what they’re […]

Yesterday Gina Sansivero wrote a really nice blog post on the rAVe blogs, called From the Periphery of the AV Industry. If you haven’t read it yet, you really ought to. Gina’s points are entertaining, insightful, and more than a little humorous. Inspired by her, and the fact that I can’t think of a beefier topic today, here are some of my […]

As you may have noticed from reading my blog posts, I have a lot of stories to tell. At least to my mind, the best stories are the ones that are funny, and the funniest ones are the ones that are at least a little scandalous. With a long career in retail, I’ve worked with a lot […]

We’ve all had experiences with customers whose decision making we didn’t agree with. Perhaps they were well-rationalized in their own minds, perhaps not. Here are a couple of examples I was just reflecting on the other day. Way back in the ’90s one of my regular corporate clients was the sound and light technician for the city’s planetarium. One […]

It’s funny how things change. There was a time when I loathed Christmas. Well, that’s not fair: maybe not loathed, but I certainly did my best to minimize it in my life. I know the reason why, too: years and years working in retail and all the things that go along with the Holiday Season, […]

It’s a consequence of belonging to industry trade associations that those associations sell your email address to companies that are looking for business partners. Sidebar to any trade association flacks who are reading this: don’t act like you don’t, we know you do. As a result, I get a lot of spam from overseas manufacturers […]

Now that the holiday selling season has kicked into high gear with the lunacy of Black Friday, it reminds me of the madness, insanity and poor decision making I’ve witnessed in my own years in retail. If anything, the holiday shopping season is defined by the fact that people want what they’re buying now: not now, but RIGHT […]

All of us can think back to pivotal moments in our lives: that one moment where, with one decision, our futures branched off in a new direction, for good or ill. I’d like to think that I’ve only ever made one terribly poor work-related choice, what you might call a “Career-Limiting Decision” in my life. […]

As an audiophile (and an audiophile in recovery, as it were) I’ve always been in the camp that subscribes to Value: that getting the Best Bang For Your Buck is a more important consideration than just throwing money around. And that’s the trick, isn’t it? Spend enough money on your audio system and of course […]

Music Matters. As Vince Bruzzese, owner of Totem Acoustic and one of my favorite people in the AV business likes to say, “Everyone is an audiophile.” And as a less-famous friend that I used to work with once said, “there are only two genres of music: good and bad.” Music has certainly been central to my life, on numerous […]

Last month, on the day of the iPhone5 announcement I was in Toronto at the Canadian Wireless Show. It was expected, yet surreal, when at 1 p.m. local time the entire trade show floor ground to a halt as everybody tuned into their phones and tablets to follow the Apple presentation for the next forty five minutes. While the resulting […]

Like it or not, if you have a job, at least most of the time they expect you to wear clothes. And if your employer doesn’t issue you an actual uniform, then they generally set a standard for what constitutes “acceptable” workplace apparel. In some cases, what not to wear might be subtle. When I […]

Long story short, this weekend I replaced three light fixtures in the house. One of them, in the laundry room, had a pull chain, and I replaced it with track lighting and added a light switch at the bottom of the stairs. To make the conversion, I gave my wife a shopping list of what I […]

This may come as a surprise to people who know me, but my relationship with Twitter has been growing distant lately. Despite the fact that I’ve gotten enormous benefit from Twitter over the years, lately it just doesn’t fit in with my life. Part of the explanation for that is fairly easy. When I was still working primarily […]

My first ever email address was a Yahoo account. I still have it: it’s been demoted to one of the disposable ones I use when I need to give my email address for something like an in-store coupon, but it’s still operative. My second email address was my work account for Sony, and the genesis for this blog […]

Just today, a friend was basking in her physical prowess: being able to dismount, move and remount her 55-inch flat panel television all by herself, a skill that she attributes to her dedication to weightlifting. While there’s nothing wrong with that, and I had no desire to burst her bubble, it made me reminisce about the old […]

When you work with the same people all day, every day, friendships and alliances are formed. In retail AV, it was always important to have a solid relationship with your co-workers, if for no other reason than so that you could count on them to ring up your sales under your commission code when the customer comes back […]

They say there are two kinds of people in the world: people who divide people into two distinct groups, and ones who don’t. Beyond that, there are definitely two types of customers: ones who don’t mind buying a repacked unit, and ones who refuse to do so. For those of you who are fortunate enough […]

Earlier Gary Kayye wrote a brief but eloquent blog post about Sony and Sharp’s financial woes, and the certain impact that Apple’s TV offering will have on control and distribution systems. If you haven’t already read it, you must. Go here, then come back and finish reading my blog post. As I said in the comments section, […]

I’ve got a lot of mileage in this blog by relating my experiences dealing with different people over the course of my career. Experiences that were sometimes strange, sometimes predictable, but more often than not surprisingly entertaining. Years ago we had a couple who were clients of ours at the integration company I worked at. […]