Gallery

Currys Digital - The High Street Rip Off

Posted on 25 Sep 2009 at 15:05

Barry Collins waits and waits for service at Currys and finds it really wasn't worth it

Call it Dixons, call it Currys.Digital, call it anything you like, but you know you're in a provincial branch of the country's best-known electrical retailer when you spot those unmistakable grey carpets on the floor.

Is the service better than the decor? Not judging by our first visit to a small Currys store in Sussex.

After hovering around the laptop shelves for at least five minutes, we finally managed to attract the attention of an enthusiastic, if rather misguided salesman.

When asked whether our mum would be better off with a netbook or full-blown laptop for basic web surfing, our man cheerfully informed us that netbooks are designed primarily for internet access and, somewhat questionably, offer "great battery life".

Netbooks are designed for accessing the internet all day, and then you charge the battery when you get home

"They are designed for accessing the internet all day, and then you charge the battery when you get home," the chap stated confidently, perhaps taking the manufacturers' quoted battery life at face value.

With some netbooks, you'd be lucky to make it through to lunch.

After heeding some reasonably sound advice on the limited processing power of netbooks, I eventually settled on a £379 Dell Inspiron 1545 laptop, with 15.6in screen, Celeron 585 processor and 160GB of hard disk space, which Mr Currys described as "a massive amount of storage".

Who knows what adjectives he was holding back to describe the 500GB disks in the higher-spec laptops on the bottom shelves?

Our man was on firmer ground when it came to recommending that we take up Currys' special half-price offer on Norton 360, which is a sensible precaution for a novice mum let loose on the internet.

His advice to upgrade to Office 2007 for "word processing and help with home finances" was perhaps a little over zealous - I couldn't see Mum firing up Excel to sort out the electricity bills. Nevertheless, his Dell recommendation was sound, even if his technical knowledge was a little frayed at the edges.

Our second visit to the far shinier Currys.Digital in Victoria station was an altogether different affair. With only three staff to serve a crowded store, we failed to get served for a full 15 minutes.

His advice to upgrade to Office 2007 for "word processing and help with home finances" was perhaps a little over zealous

Instead, we resorted to the demonstration software that's installed on all the display laptops, which provides clear, no-nonsense guidance on the different types of laptop, and diligently explains the difference between notebooks and netbooks.

A video showing the Eee PC running Office 2007 smoothly was a little far-fetched, as was the demonstration of "in-game performance" that was nothing more than a video trailer and nothing to do with the performance of that PC.

Would we trust the software over the salesman? It's a close call.

Carphone Warehouse

Tesco

Independent Retailers

PC World

Comet

John Lewis