The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Shoppers Deck Their Homes With PCs : Computers: Consumer electronics retailers enjoy record business. Despite Intel’s handling of bug, Pentium sales are strong.
Happily for personal computer makers and retailers, the Pentium bug did not end up being the Glitch That Stole Christmas.
Whereas many retailers had trouble meeting sales goals, consumer electronics sales soared, largely on the strength of booming sales of PCs to the home market.
International Data Corp., a market research firm, projects that PC shipments in this year’s fourth quarter will rise a robust 32%, to 5.8 million units, over those in last year’s final period. Multimedia-hungry families latched onto machines in record numbers, straining supplies at consumer electronics, warehouse and office products stores.
“A lot of the aggregate steam of the market is based in the consumer market or derived from the evolution of consumer technologies as they bubble up into the small business or corporate market,” said Richard Zwetchkenbaum, research director at the firm, based in Framingham, Mass.
With few exceptions, PC makers rose to the occasion, offering powerful systems with built-in software at affordable prices--generally from $1,600 to $3,000. IBM, which vastly underestimated the potential for its new Aptiva line of desktop PCs, had the unfortunate distinction of being left on the bench as manufacturers such as Apple Computer and Compaq scored big gains. Privately held Packard Bell, for one, said sales for all of 1994 will total $3 billion, more than double the 1993 level.
At the CompUSA store in City of Industry, “very few systems went out the door without multimedia,” said Scott Patrick Costello, a sales associate. At Whole Earth Access in San Francisco, families with young children “were very excited” about Apple Computer’s Performa line of CD-ROM systems, which are capable of playing sound and moving pictures, a spokesman said.
The Good Guys consumer electronics chain, with 59 stores in California, Washington state and Nevada, sold “a wicked big amount” of personal computers, said spokesman Keith Foxe, who added: “Consumers were there to buy, and they wanted speed.”
That appeared to account for the continuing popularity of machines based on Intel Corp.’s Pentium chip, despite the bashing the Santa Clara-based giant took for its handling of a defect in the advanced microprocessor.
Shoppers at CompUSA’s City of Industry store had “quite a few concerns” about the Pentium, Costello noted, but visiting Intel representatives were able to allay most of those. He added that “Pentium sales have been picking up.”
Fred Kern, vice president of product marketing for Packard Bell in Westlake Village, said one major national retailer, which he declined to name, reported that Pentium was its top seller in the consumer electronics category.
Even so, Zwetchkenbaum of IDC maintained that the Pentium debacle represented a watershed--the passage of the PC into a consumer rather than a corporate product. Consumers, he noted, are bound to be more cautious about technology leaps from now on.
“As a result of the lessons learned,” he said, “the public information exchange (about computer products) will be forever changed.”
