“Dell plans to begin selling desktop PCs in Wal-Mart stores this weekend, the first move in a major departure from its decades-long sales strategy,” Steven Musil blogs for CNET.
“Wal-Mart plans to sell the Dimension E521 in more than 3,000 retail locations in the United States, Samir Bhavnani, research director at Current Analysis West, told CNET News.com,” Musil blogs. “‘Finally, Dell has addressed one of its main problems by giving customers a chance to touch and feel its products,’ Bhavnani said.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Scott R.” for the heads up.]
MacDailyNews Take: Uh, Dell, are you sure that’s really a good idea? How is giving customers a chance to touch and feel Dell’s commodity-grade products supposed to increase sales of Dell PCs? Seems like it would do the opposite. That said, Wal-Mart and Dell seems like the perfect “left side of the bell curve” marriage. PCs sold to people who don’t know what they’re buying by people who don’t know what they’re selling. Mouthbreathers rejoice!
Crap at the Crap Shack
Old Mikey wants to stuff the channel, claim they’ve sold a ton of computers and stop the stock slide.
Little does he know, this Microsoft tactic doesn’t work.
Their store-within-a-store will be called Dell-Mart and I’m sure it will always be kept neat and tidy.
“Dell plans to begin selling desktop PCs in Wal-Mart stores…” LOL !!!
Now that’s a match made in heaven. These two are perfect for each other. Maybe you’ll even get a free Big Mac™ with your fast-food computer, too!
Enjoy the slide, Mike, Next stop, The Dollar Store.
-c
Oh wait, I almost forgot…
Beleaguered Dell Beleaguered Dell Beleaguered Dell Beleaguered Dell Beleaguered Dell Beleaguered Dell Beleaguered Dell Beleaguered Dell Beleaguered Dell Beleaguered Dell Beleaguered Dell Beleaguered Dell Beleaguered Dell Beleaguered Dell Beleaguered Dell Beleaguered Dell Beleaguered Dell Beleaguered Dell Beleaguered Dell Beleaguered Dell Beleaguered Dell Beleaguered Dell Beleaguered Dell Beleaguered Dell Beleaguered Dell Beleaguered Dell Beleaguered Dell Beleaguered Dell Beleaguered Dell Beleaguered Dell Beleaguered Dell Beleaguered Dell Beleaguered Dell Beleaguered Dell Beleaguered Dell Beleaguered Dell Beleaguered Dell
I could just imagine these bins in the middle of the isles at Walmart with dells thrown in them haphazardly and people picking through them to find the “good” one.
“Now lets go to the monitor bin.”
“How is giving customers a chance to touch and feel Dell’s commodity-grade products supposed to increase sales of Dell “
Consider the audience. These are PC’s for the ‘”Anything is better than nothing as long as it’s cheap” crowd.
Unfortunately, this might actually work for Dell. People that shop at Wal-Mart want to drive home with their new PC that day, not order it online. They probably don’t know the difference between memory and disk space, so they don’t care about the kwality (with a k) that Dell provides. They care about price. So, I think that Dell will have success doing this.
I remember when Wal-Mart sold Macs. I went in there to mess around with one and found that they had taken off the mouse ball and locked it on screen saver because too many people had messed with them. I asked them why they even bothered to turn them on if people can’t play with the computer to see how it works. They didn’t have much of a response.
Dell going for the redneck crowd.
Dell is falling apart. I just replaced 10 Dells in my office (hold the comments, it’s being paid for by an insurance settlement and they won’t pay for Macs), and it took nearly 3 weeks for Dell to fill the entire order. These aren’t even unusual configurations.
If they can’t execute the build to order business model that they built the company on, they have serious problems.
A Dell for every farm.
the dell dimension e521 starts at $359 on the dell website. the average rating is 4.8 out of 5 stars. wonder if walmart will sell it for a lower price and how many options they will offer, if any.
A move done by Dell out of severe desperation. People are only now coming to realize the quality of Dell…which is crap. Dell realizes this…and to slow down its major downhill of a sales drop…they now sell their cheap computers at wal-mart….which btw, cannot get more better…nor worse.
The sad yet funny thing here is that they skipped Future Shop, BestBuy, Circuit City, The Source, and many other top COMPUTER resellers…and then went straight down to the bottom of the barrel…to Wal-Mart.
In my opinion they should open up “Dell stores”, kind of like Apple stores…that way they could garner a better reputation for quality (it would take a long time for the damage to be reversed if it ever does happen…but neverthless it will atleast improve from the current situation).
Going straight down to Wal-Mart level is just sad really….just sad.
@ChrissyOne
I think we’ve got your message now about “beleaguered Dell”. You must have posted that script a thousdand times by now.
No offence, but time to give it a rest?
I can only imagine (with great glee) the “advice” offered by Wal-Mart’s friendly staff.
“I got ’bout a million pitures of Bessy, my cow. Can I get them in this thing?”
Clerk: “Go to the kitchen stuff….they got knives there.”
As has been observed, a “Match Made in Heaven.”
@ ABQ Peter
I can’t imagine they’ll have any options. Probably one or two flavors (‘cheap’ and ‘ridiculously cheap’) and people will love them… for a couple of months.
Hey wow!!! 3 pallets of DVD players, and they’re only 30 dollars!!!
Trouble is, that DVD player will go tits up inside of 6 months, and then go into a landfill. I know a troublingly large number of people who buy cheap stuff at Wal*Mart and I hear this same story over and over. But they just keep going back for more, and the garbage keeps piling up.
We’ve dumbed consumer electronics down to disposable, bottom feeding MacDonalds level. I can only imagine cars will be next.
-c
Hey MDN, I totally agree that Dell’s doing down in flames. But how can we say that Dell’s stupid for going into Wal-Mart without also wondering about Apple’s sanity when they sold shuffles in Wal-Mart back in 2005?
http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/4858/
@ Macaday
Consider it rested.
@chrissyOne
Cars are in fact next. Chrysler just signed a deal to import Chinese made compact cars that will sell for less than $10,000. Coming soon to a Wal Mart parking lot near you.
The only good thing is that cars are 95% recycled when they are junked.
Wal-Mart is an evil evil evil evil corporation — check out the movie “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price”:
http://www.walmartmovie.com
The dental school where I work is seriously considering going to Macbook/MBPs for the student laptops within a year or two. (All students are required to have laptops and currently those are Dell D820s.) Sure there will be a few transition pains, but they have some good guys at IT, and since a number of the departments already use Macs as well as IT, it will be less painless than someone with no familiarity whatsoever. They’re just getting sick of all the shit from Dell. Of course they would probably have Boot Camp installed and XP if they can get it but once they start going to Macs, then they will be a force for getting more dental software development for Macintoshes. Truthfully though, most of my last few dentists and both orthodontists I’m familiar with in my area are Macheads. With that note, maybe Apple taking Dell’s buggered #2 spot isn’t so impossible, without the whole buggered part. Wonder how their respective market values compare now.
Actually, I was in a GROCERY STORE here in Des Moines, Iowa, and they are selling Dell Laptops now. I’m sure its a short term thing, but good lord, they’re trying everything.
@MacBill
That is among the many reasons why I never shop at Wal-Mart. They are very pathetic corporation the worst perhaps next to Monsanto.