Gadgetory

alright folks let's get serious about what really happens at CES and that is buyers come to buy I'm Brian Cooley here on the stage at CES 2012 examining the way forward as we've been doing all the whole CES show here from cnet joining me now to give us a perspective that we've never brought you before in all the years we've been covering CES it's about damn time we do it's chad taylor from ab to lex tronox in based in chicago you guys are a force in the Midwest Chad but you're not a national but you guys are deeply rooted in CES correct craig so we're a single store retailer lo tailee located in Glenview Illinois which is a suburb of Chicago yeah you know one store family-owned operation you know carry everything from your you know basic refrigerator up to you know your ultrabooks your high-end appliances high-end TVs I mean you name it we can pretty much do it it's a navy furniture yepp baby furniture I mean if they got a place to put the stove and get it home it never ends with us you know it's definitely something we take pride in describe your store layout because you guys are really innovative in how your store is said I've never if you have never been to an AB to the app store it's not just a big box would you used to work for the biggest of the big boxes but what's your store laid out like um so you know you under main store it very you know appliances on the Left TVs consumer electronics on the right and then you walk into our HP mirror we have a big huge fountain that plays water shows throughout the day then you have our gourmet shop where you can get everything for your kitchen that you can possibly imagine and then you get into our sony store or connect store which is our computer store yeah and then our apple boutique and then I can't forget our time watch store yes I consumer electronics or sells watches so you guys are kind of make this little village of different interests in tech now you're here shopping for tablets and laptops primarily right yep tablets laptops desktops anything accessories go along with anything like that tell us how it works you come to CES you've just got a map to walk the floor you have meetings who do you talk to you I so you know predominately I come in and I have meetings so I meet with you know I met with Lenovo yesterday so all their new stuff I'll meet with a suits and Sony today I'll meet with some accessory vendors tomorrow so that's basically my at my week I don't really get to walk the floor as much as I like but it's interesting because you're in meetings and all this stuff something more we know how many millions of dollars these companies spend instead of these boots but they want to get with you personally what happens there that we don't know about ah so in some cases I'll see stuff that you know hasn't come out yet and has that we haven't seen possibly in some cases soloing I get to see the stuff before it even you know becomes public in some cases yeah you know so back to school stuff that's new concept even holiday for possibly you know so the new asus tablet oh you guys saw yesterday i'll get to see that hopefully today yeah you know so in some cases apps you know we talked about you know forecasting and we talked about you know any product shortages anything like that these aren't just hey that's gee whiz great stuff you guys are working each other right they want you to buy a lot and you want to be convinced it's going to move yep so you know they want me to buy a lot I want them to give me great deals you know you know we want to make sure that you know the product sells well that we can get replenished quickly it doesn't so well we can move it out quickly so anyway so it's a constant struggle to find the exact perfect product that sells really well and you know hopefully we know makes the money tell you about some of the some of the projects you've seen here let's take laptops for example ultrabooks are really hot what do you see the chill a couple models or edible features ah so the yoga from Lenovo's definitely you know by far my favorite piece right now and they've got their new I night what they're a 700 series coming out where you can actually take the 27 inch touch panel and lay it flat and it's actually 10-point touch you can actually type play on piano yeah so you got a look at the yoga here that is there the Chad's been looking at is the one is highly articulated there's a 306 yeah solder easel it starts as a regular laptop and you can literally take and Bend the screen back and it flips it over now you got a tablet do you think that works or is there too much bulk when it's in tablet mode to be really a considered a tablet you know it's it's it's going to be a definitely market for people you know because I carry a tablet em laptop yeah a lot of stuff so you know for me to have the functionality with windows 8 to do everything I need to do with one device how did we'll do a little bit of the bulkiness yeah we're talking to chad taylor from abdill ektron exceeds here he's a buyer for apt and he's looking for laptops looking for tablets Weaver desktops some gaming gear as well right yes we had to play with the PlayStation Vita the other day yeah do you like it was pretty cool so definitely I liked a lot better than the PSP much more responsive much more comfortable as well interesting when you place an order you have to figure out what you want and how many of them you want you mentioned forecasting no no how do you know what we want you want sumers hey you know you that i read Cena and you just tell me my man so you know we asked I mean you so we do we do listen to to our customers you know the nice thing about app we've been and we've been in chicago area for so long now that you know our customers will just flat out tell us hey we're looking for this and we try to go out and find it now your website looks like it's a great big sophisticated ecommerce website now but your store is a very different thing you guys were founded a long time ago by jewel and David Abbott they were Hall of Fame inductees for the cea in 2008 ma they are part of the original siiii crowd in this country what do you guys do differently than a best buy or any of the other big boxes that may be out in your area um this is like a major local vendor which is almost kind of a weird mix so you know one of the one of the biggest things that I half is our people while you got sales people who have been there 40 years you know so there you know you got people who have been there you know and that's what they specialize in so if you have an a sales person that you've worked with for 25 years and they're gonna tell you hey go talk to so and so in our computer store go talk to so and so who you're going to trust that person that you're going to work with automatically yeah absolutely so let me get this right I go into your store and I've got a question about tech and I'm gonna get someone informed to tell me my answer absolutely who knew that was possible right beautiful so yeah we definitely take pride in knowing our products knowing what's going on on the world and we do take front of our training as well yeah let's talk about what you do with this whole area of online is offline majority of your sales are through the cider in the store um we have a good mix of us we actually we actually do sales three ways in-store online and we do have a huge phone sales department so we just like that so if you see someone inside there folks that are buying the latest laptops and tablets but they want to do it on the phone absolutely you still have people who don't want to put their credit card number in on a computer it's just a lot of people don't so we take hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of phone calls a day we actually just went to 24 hours on Monday through Friday when we have someone who will answer the phone for you you guys remind me little bit about like like B&H photo I'm sure they're an archrival but you guys are in that same sort of you know you have a locus in one major city but you have a big reach how do you guys get your product mix together we've heard what you look for to say yes to you also have to say no to a lot of products you only have so much shelf space because you run a real store is a big part of your operation you have to say more to make me more things than then an online retailer who can drop ship everything right is it tough to make those calls you ever make the wrong call and say we didn't buy the right one sure you you always make the good college you make the bad calls too so you know one of the nice things is is uh you know because we're one store we don't have you know the thousand source of support we can be very selective in what we have but we also special order almost anything so for instance with our Apple assortment you know we will special order any configuration our customers want without any problem nine times out of ten if customer walks in they see a specific laptop you know that and we can get it will order it for him we're definitely gonna say yes any reasonable request so the big talk that was going on during the holiday is about the retail space versus online people were going into stores like yours or bestbuy or any of these places looking for things using their QR code of their bar scanner app on the camera and then buying it on Amazon after they checked it out in the store is that a problem how are you guys dealing with it um so again it's loyal to think for us and our customers definitely want to shop with us we do have you know great a great great customer base but you know again if it's if it's being sold by amazon and we're gonna and we we need to price match it nine times I 10 will price match amazon so we don't have a price match amazon nine times out of ten yeah it's got to be sold by amazon right but we're not okay fulfilled by it alright not just some sort of Amazon network merchant you got it interesting okay lastly one asked you about has it been the news a lot is the the thai floods have been hitting a lot of people don't know this i think almost every nikon DSLR is actually made in thailand and components for lots of cameras and computers come out of Thailand and that's been I mean literally unprecedented flooding in that country what have you heard about what that's going to do to the supply of things that use hard drives so hard hard drives are definitely gonna be some shortages and hard drives and we've already seen that seeing some cost increases I you know for especially for companies who didn't have a lot of stock to begin with you know so the interesting thing is is the bigger drives for desktops are going to be hard and hard to find little big one too terribly so especially the two terabyte drives some laptops are going to be affected you know they're working through it but you know when you deal with at kind of devastation you know entire factories underwater yeah workers and people displaced so we're definitely seen go see some pains for you know next couple months I think yeah after that it kind of it should hopefully get better soon what categories do you see going cool at the store things that you know industry-wide or just kind of think we're losing interest um you know with all the Ultrabook talk you know the the big huge monstrous laptops you know I'd oh yeah what's called the desktop right you know so you know even for me i mean i run around my store all day with my laptop in my hand i run around the little 14-inch i don't know where you know I used to carry a 15 16 inch laptop you know desktops all in ones are definitely starting to kind of get even more of a big hold on the traditional desktop yeah and then with windows 8 coming out and being able to utilize a touchscreen even more I think that will continue a lot of times and Windows comes out with a new aversion lexer comes out the new version of Windows it's 10 it can be but isn't always a huge spike cycle it can be like a long cycle you guys enjoy four months or a year do you think Windows 8 is going to be a watershed errs are going to be one of the quieter windows driving releases you know when a sudden is great it is I think it's a guess um I think if they can definitely put enough value in it and make it reasonably priced for the upgrade yeah you know it definitely could help helpless else but seven was good and that kind of makes it tougher for eight to drive a lot of folks in the door right yeah willing in with XP still around I mean you got windows seven that support XP people to realize how popular XP is XP solar I did dad you gotta people still haven't migrated to seven so especially because of corporate yeah alright Chad thanks so much for being here for Chad Taylor from Abdullah tronox in Chicago who is giving us a point of view though we don't hear enough of around here and it's kind of the backbone of why people come to consumer electronics show so thank you very much Chad that's at the electronics there at ABT ab com kind of an unusual name that's how it's spelled