[Claritas]

Here's how you leave:

Spoiler: Warning: Spoiler!

[VIDEO]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm7nrQTysm4[/VIDEO]

 

[mikemercer]

  I went to Stereo Exchange yesterday to try their new Headphone Lounge.
 
I was there for two reasons:
 

• I buy a lot of headphones, and I was interested to hear some of the newer, more rare models that are usually impossible to try anywhere in person, such as the HE-560, Phonon SMB-02, and Audezes, and a couple of rare amps like the Auralic Taurus.
• I sometimes review headphones for my blog, and there were a handful of high-end portable models like the Aedle, Master & Dynamic, and Martin Logan that I wanted to try so I could know whether to recommend them.

 
When I picked up the first interesting pair I saw (Phonon — surprisingly lightweight), the salesman started asking me the usual questions to see what I was looking for, and I, stupidly and naively, told him both reasons. (Although I also intended to write my impressions in a notebook, which probably would have tipped them off even if I hadn't said anything.)
 
The nearby manager overheard me and was immediately confrontational. "You have a website?"
 
"Yeah, I sometimes review headphones on my blog."
 
"Do you sell them?"
 
"No, I just review and recommend them. I'm also looking for myself, since—"
 
"I don't understand. You sell them?"
 
The salesman helpfully chimed in. "No, he just writes about them — and you link to places to buy them?"
 
"Yes."
 
That was it. Game over.
 
"So you're taking business away from us? I can't have you in here using our equipment just to tell people to buy it somewhere else! I don't think I can allow this."
 
I tried damage control. "Sorry, I hadn't considered that. I see where you're coming from — can I make this benefit you somehow? You don't sell online, right?"
 
"What? Right, but I can't have you—"
 
"Well, I'm sure people read my site who live here. What if I link to you in anything I write about these, thanking you for letting me demo them and telling people to check out your store?"
 
"But you're just taking business away from us."
 
"What if I just don't link to other stores in the reviews of these models?"
 
"I don't know… I'd have to get something in writing."
 
"Sure, I'd be happy to sign something."
 
"Let me ask my husband [the co-owner], I don't know about this, hold on."
 
She called him and presented the case. "There's someone here who wants to try our equipment and then tell people to buy it online. We don't want him in here, right?… OK, that's what I thought." [hangs up] "No, we won't allow that. You need to go."
 
Clearly, this was not going to be the considered discussion I was hoping for.
 
But I made one last attempt. I pointed out that they sell lots of products that you can't buy online, Amazon has no price advantage on most of them, I can leave out the links, hardly anyone offers a showroom for high-end headphones anywhere so it's a huge draw for customers, and surely there must be something I can do to encourage my audience to bring value to their business.
 
She wouldn't have any of it, and instead berated me. "You people buy everything online, and then when you have a problem, who do you call? Where do you go?"
 
"Me?… Uh, I just go to wherever I bought it."
 
"No, you call us and ask, 'How do I plug this in? How does this work?'"
 
As relatively rude as she was, and as little as she was actually considering (or even hearing) my ideas to make it worthwhile for them, I couldn't really argue with her core point. Most people who read my site don't live in Manhattan and are likely to buy inexpensive headphones online. There's not much I can do about that, of course — people will buy online regardless of whether I link to Amazon — and I can completely understand why a huge store's owner, exasperated by years of online competition, would be so offended by someone who represents that world. I mostly just felt dumbfounded, foolish, and guilty that I had inadvertently committed an ethical offense and gotten myself kicked out of a store that I spent 3 hours round-trip to see.
 
I apologized and left. I sent them an apology email as well, but it was met with a similar response.
 
I think there are a few takeaways that might be useful to people other than me:
 
First, if you buy something online, don't try to get tech support in unrelated stores. That's not cool.
 
Second, if a store helps you choose something, buy it there. That's why I bought my TH900 and HD 800 from HeadRoom, my HE-6 from The Cable Company, and my pile of Schiit from Schiit. Most high-end headphones have fixed prices and cost the same regardless of where you buy them, so there's very little reason not to support the places that help you.
 
And finally, if you ever find yourself at Stereo Exchange... don't mention the internet. At all. They have an amazing collection of headphones — I just wish I had a chance to try any.

This just flat-out pisses me off!
as this is OLD WORLD THINKING 
 
Like this dealer I know who yelled at me, literally yelled at me, when I walked into the Los Angeles & Orange County Audio Society Gala last year (of which I'm the Senior VP of Personal Listening - so this seemed odd all around):
 
He said "Michael how can you support all of these personal audio companies, they sell stuff on Amazon"!
 
I said "Amazon is the largest online retailer on the planet" "You want me to stop supporting them because they sell their products where the majority of online shoppers go?"
 
and it just got hairy from there...
 
I know Dave Wasserman - who owns Stereo Exchange, and I can't imagine he'd be down for this treatment of you in ANYWAY
 
Has anybody contacted him about this?
If not - I will
 
I see this as an uninformed, ridiculous, old school way-of-thinking (like 20th Century thinking) - because, NO MATTER WHAT:
 
If you're a reviewer, have your own blog, and whatever - you're still a consumer.
AND: You actually tried to play ball, from what I read into this - and tried to turn it around and offer to link to them!!
 
They just had a big event there for the opening of the headphone lounge - which included Steve Guttenberg and Audeze sponsored it I believe.
They wouldn't want this goin' on either I'd imagine.
 
And, I find it rather odd that MOST of these NYC dealers (including a salesman from Stereo Exchange - which WAS one of my favorite stereo stores in NYC) flat-out attacked me when I spoke to a crowd with Harry Pearson at RMAF in 2009 about creating computer audio and headphone-oriented spots in their stores for those specific shoppers who aren't interested in 30k speakers!!!  One of them, in Maryland even calls it their "iFi Lounge" which is even funnier  because I wrote an article (that Jude shared on the main page here back when there was the revolving ticker - I wrote it for PFO) entitled The Birth of iFi in PFO that same year (which is the article we were speaking about at RMAF)
 
I don't know - I think this is indicative of why the high end broke itself off so completely from consumer culture  - and turned so elitist it wonders why the business is in a flat-spin...

 

[EmpJ]

@mikemercer That was amazing. Thanks for the read! I don't know why I'm so hooked to this thread. I think we all can learn so much from this thread. 
 
What bothers me most is that they made the OP feel so bad about what he did, that he felt that he had to send them an apology after. 
 
They're just annoyed cause they haven't figured out the internet and are eventually going to lose the game. Certain people seem to have to scapegoat others for their own problems. 

 

[SunTanScanMan]

  She wouldn't have any of it, and instead berated me. "You people buy everything online, and then when you have a problem, who do you call? Where do you go?"
 
"Me?… Uh, I just go to wherever I bought it."
 
"No, you call us and ask, 'How do I plug this in? How does this work?'"
 

 
If someone calls this store with such a query on audio equipment, do they check whether that person has bought something from them before answering the questions??!?
 
IMO even if it is a random person, and even if it does in their view get annoying, that person has actively sought out the details of the store and contacted them. That should mean something, at least an opportunity...
 
Personally, reading the OP's account was pretty painful - a car crash where both the consumer and seller lost out. It's a real shame, as the store seems to have a great collection of equipment on offer.

 

[Radio_head]

On the one hand, I see their point as a generality, and it is one reason so many hifi brick and mortars have shuttered their doors in the last decade (take a look at hifihouse's recent multimillion dollar foreclosure as an example.)  However, all these headphone models have numerous reviews online, and anyone already reading blogs or online reviews will do an internet search anyways.  So in a practical sense, anyone reading what you write will not make much impact on their local sales.
 
In Stereo Exchange's case, I think it is possible that they are really paranoid of what people write about on the internet.  Seriously, their yelp is a tragedy.  From acting snide to those wearing t-shirts or with accents to yelling at an arm-less customer needing a repair (their official response on yelp includes questioning if he is really armless.  I am not kidding.)  Thinking of yourself as besieged by internet bloggers is never fun (take a look at Kitchen Nightmares' episode with Amy's Bakery to get the full on crazy of hating the customer largely because they're just going to write a "blog" online.)
 
I know it can be really hard to run this type of store.  For every person who buys something, they must get tens yanking their chain (or trying some out and then buying beats across the street at Best Buy.)  The fact that they treated you this way is not cool though, and even less so that you wrote an apology letter and it was taken in the same spirit.

 

[marcoarment]

  I know Dave Wasserman - who owns Stereo Exchange, and I can't imagine he'd be down for this treatment of you in ANYWAY
 
Has anybody contacted him about this?
If not - I will

 
I'd rather you didn't — Dave is already aware (his wife was the manager, he was the one on the other end of the phone, and he's the one who responded to the email). They were angry enough at me for being there at all, and I don't want to make it worse.
 
I posted this here not for retribution, but more out of bewilderment and as a warning to others not to repeat this sort of thing. I'll regret having posted this if everyone starts personally bothering the founder about it. (That's one of the reasons I posted this here instead of my blog or Twitter, where a lot more people would see it and the chances of unwanted retaliation would be much higher.)
 
I'm at peace with the current result now. They refused to have me as a customer, so I won't be; I also won't attend their events (I'd likely be unwelcome anyway) or recommend that anyone else go there. They don't want my business, so they don't get it — simple as that. I'm not going to leave a nasty Yelp review or anything (they have quite a lot of those already... had I read them before going, I probably wouldn't have gone) — that's more punitive than I think is warranted for this incident, for which there's probably fault on both sides.
 
If they're seeing declining sales that they ascribe to the internet (which is probably not most of the problem), I believe their hostility toward people like me will only accelerate those problems. But it's their business to run as they see fit, just as it's our decision where we shop.

 

[Spareribs]

I think it can also be a part of the New York/ North East USA culture. New York can be a tough place to survive and it can be a cold city. I kind of doubt that people in a hi fi store in Texas or Atlanta would act this way where politeness and laid back attitude is part of the culture.

Don't get me wrong. I love New York. But there can be this defensive way of thinking that can unfortunately exist.

 

[Jodet]

I think they did the right thing.   

 

[Steve Eddy]

I think they did the right thing.   

Why?

se

 

[GearMe]

Why?

se

 
Either trolling...or a future Stereo Exchange employee!  

 

[Steve Eddy]

Either trolling...or a future Stereo Exchange employee!  

se

 

[Claritas]

Either trolling...or a future Stereo Exchange employee!  

It's actually pretty courageous of him to disagree and I'd be interested in hearing his reasons, though they're unlikely to change my mind.

 

[GearMe]

It's actually pretty courageous of him to disagree and I'd be interested in hearing his reasons, though they're unlikely to change my mind.

Absolutely! I'll start the popcorn.

But seriously, never one to discourage rational discussion and always willing to learn from someone's perspective!

 

[ivanrocks321]

Thank you op, I never really felt quite comfortable in that place but know I know why. They have lost another potential customer likely I will never set foot into there again, its a shame since they do have some nice lineup of products to try and sometimes stopping by to check them out is convenient for me. I wish they understand when customer service is great enough it can make the customer WANT to buy from them despite knowing it may not be the most cheapest way, because that is what hi-end is partially about a more PERSONAL experience. not all shops hifi shops are like this in nyc in fact I had a wonderful experience at another place I almost bought wanted to buy K812 even though I was not in the market and it was not quite my cup of tea!
 
If this message ends up ever being seen by Stereo Exchange, they better get their act together or else more people will be exchanging future visits and sales for an out of business sign on their door.

 

[jbreen]

I, for one, will boycott that store. I hate rude sales people period. Walking with my feet!