The John Lewis factor
Over the course of several weeks, we tried to interview a John Lewis representative to discuss what the company could offer the PC buyer and how it trains its staff. Despite promises of callbacks, however, all our efforts came to naught. This is a shame, since John Lewis offers a two-year guarantee with all the PCs it sells, so on the surface would seem like a sensible place to go. Our blind-buy results were, to put it kindly, mixed.
As with PC World, we’re 100% confident John Lewis’ staff are there to help, not to hoodwink you. We did find it more difficult to get assistance, but once we had someone’s attention, it was clear they were doing their best to provide advice. “To be honest,” one assistant told us, “I wouldn’t buy a PC from here. I’d build it myself.” This was surprising, since he couldn’t tell us anything about graphics cards other than “GeForces are good”.
It’s a shame that the knowledge on offer from the staff we spoke to was so poor, as was the selection of machines on show. Where both PC World branches had more than ten desktop PCs on show, John Lewis High Wycombe found room for only three (not counting all-in-one PCs or Macs). There were more on display at John Lewis Oxford Street, but few were plugged in.
With this lack of emphasis on desktop PCs, it perhaps isn’t surprising that the assistance on offer was almost negligible. We were guided through the basics of Intel’s Core processors, but after that, one salesperson admitted his ignorance and took us to a PC to flick through the options on johnlewis.com.
Another assistant was more knowledgeable, but the phrase “a little knowledge can be dangerous” comes to mind. We were advised that a Core i7 was essential for gaming and that we’d have to pay more than £1,000 if we wanted a machine with an SSD rather than a hard disk.
Admittedly, the latter is true if you order from John Lewis’ website, and therein lies the rub again: with so few models on show, if you did manage to find something you liked then chances are it won’t be in stock at the shop.
Buy or not?
There’s one clear conclusion from our excursion: computing remains an immensely complicated world, full of acronyms and product names that mean little to someone who isn’t interested in the subject.
Components are particularly complicated. On a number of occasions, the salespeople we spoke to got tangled, with graphics cards being a favourite stumbling block. We were told a “GeForce was equivalent to an AMD”, and that we should instead choose a GTX. We were also told that DDR5 memory in the latest cards should be avoided because it made “the image go funny”. This, incidentally, was from the person who otherwise offered the best recommendations.
Our advice? Stick to the specialists.