I went to Jessops because I thought that they would stock a full range of cameras which I could handle and try before buying - In these days of mail-order I still regard this as very important. I intended to buy a Canon Ixus (or something similar) or/and a Canon S110.
I chose Tuesday afternoon to visit the shop: It's usually a quiet day when you don't have to compete for attention.
I wandered around the empty shop looking at cameras for about an hour. There were three or four salesmen chatting at the back of the shop, all of them ignored me. One of them eventually emerged to talk to three young people (two of them girls) and then another came to talk to me. Later I spoke to another salesman. Neither of these chaps seemed to know a lot about their stock, cameras or photography, and both seemed to have been trained to give presentations by a very bad elocution teacher - I certainly didn't feel like a person when they were talking to me.
More irritating still was that although the shop had the two cameras I wanted, and a few others that interested me, in all cases the batteries weren't charged. I mentioned this to first chap I spoke to and he didn't seem to regard it as a problem: 'they'ed been very busy' he said. That wasn't my impression.
I left empty handed feeling quite disappointed and annoyed that I had wasted an afternoon traveling 30 miles for nothing, and rather puzzled that Jessops had failed to capitalise on their advantages of being able to talk to their customers and demonstrate cameras.
09-04-14
