To All:
I'm still on the road, but wanted to share my visit to an H.H. Gregg location with you. Yesterday I found an H.H. Gregg location in Indianapolis on my way to the airport. I was only able to spend about 15 minutes with the sales person, but they do in fact have the V-gis decoders in stock. They had a V-gis unit hooked up to a large screen Sony TV for demonstration purposes. Here are some observations based on my brief exposure:
1. H.H. Gregg just recently received the V-gis decoders. 2. It was obvious that the sales rep knew very little about the v-chip technology in general and the V-gis product in particular. More confirmation that awareness (at all levels!) is a problem. 3. The V-gis unit is very compact and has an infra-red sensing "eye" that can be mounted inconspicuously (sp?) while the decoder box itself can be hidden elsewhere. The sensor is about the size of a U.S. 50 cent piece, so it's pretty unnoticable. 4. The store is keeping the V-gis units in "secured" area, along with things like radar detectors, etc., i.e. products that are viewed as being easy to shoplift. Unfortunately, this means the customer has to look harder to find it, as opposed to having a large display of product out in the open. The could use a placard or poster to atleast draw attention to the product, but I did not see anything like this. 5. I played with the unit a little bit. The functionality struck me as very basic and straight-forward, but again, I had little time to really put it through it's paces. 6. One thing that surprised me was that I wanted to see what happened when the unit was set to block at a particular level and "tripped" by a program above the desired rating (wouldn't that seem to be an obvious feature that a consumer would like to see?). You won't believe this, but the store only had an antenna feed into the TV (no cable). At the time I was there, the only thing on was news aand sports programs on the major networks. Since those aren't rated, I wasn't able to get the unit to "trip", even when I set the decoder to the lowest level acceptable rating!! I couldn't believe it. Needless to say, I gave the sales rep a little "coaching" on how to demonstrate a v-chip product effectively! Duh!! 7. Another thing I found interesting (and I did not have time to completely understand) is that it appeared from the instructions that the V-gis decoder the consumer should purchase varied by the way you have your hook-ups configured. More specifically, it seemed to depend upon whether you have your feeds coming into a cable box or from and antenna type of feed. What concerned me was that it seemed to imply that the unit being currently marketed would NOT accomodate all configurations. In fact, the box for the unit indicated that you should purchase the "other" V-gis type box for certain configurations. The problem is, I HAVEN'T SEEN THE "OTHER" BOX!! If my understanding is correct, in my mind this could lead to real confusion on the part of the consumer. Howevcer, it might explain why the store had the display TV only set up with an antenna feed, and not cable. If true, this is a real problem from a marketing perspective in my mind.
Unfortunately that's all the time I had to spend in the store, but at least we know that the product is out there on retail shelves. I'm very anxious to get my hands on a V-gis box to do a more thorough look.
TZ, here's the phone number of the store I visited: 317-293-4922. Just didn't want you to think you'd been left out . . . |