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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • The volumes of cash that Microsoft throw at retailers (custom builders / big box) is astronomical. Worked for a relatively small retailer with some international buying power. EOFY “MDF” from Microsoft was an absurd figure.

    Our builders would belt out 3 - 6 machines per day, depending on complexity of the custom build, the pre-built machines were in the 6+ per day range.

    Considering the vast majority of those machines were running windows (some sold without an os), from a quick estimate after too many beers we were out of pocket 10% at most of the bulk buy price for licence keys after our “market development funds” came through.

    It’s fucking crook.


  • Had my boss trying to grab a pdf (crosswords, colouring pages, printed for kids in a pub) while using Chrome without any adblock extensions.

    The volume of ads, trick links, and shite on that one website in particular was outstanding. She asked me if a link was OK to click. Promptly pointed out she should use Firefox (which has unlock and other extensions added) instead of chrome as the link she had clicked was for some sketchy software and not a crossword.

    I can’t imagine the internet without ad blockers. Ublock is a great addition, removing elements from pages is a huge advantage. So many sites sling rubbish wherever they can.










  • Company I worked for was the only importer of Corsair chairs into Australia, we were told by Corsair (on a chair by chair basis) to have end users destroy faulty chairs if no replacement parts were available.

    Same thing with Lian Li, we had a batch of white cases with a paint defect, they were never sold onto end-users but our warehouse teams destroyed every case, sent images to Lian Li of the destruction and we were sent another shipment.

    Cooler-master had some bad mITX PSUs, same deal, sent the boys out with a hammer and safety squints.

    At the end of the day it’s cheaper for everyone involved to not have a faulty product that is too costly to repair shipped across the ocean or to a local disty. Sucks for the environment, sucks for the end user having to dispose of a faulty product but it makes for some interesting emails sent out to customers :D







  • Yeah that’s funded by the brand, Logitech and other big brands would give me MDF and scanback on every product sold during a promotion (that was pushed by said brand). We would not make as much margins per unit sold but we would move bulk product.

    MDF would go to the internal marketing team for producing assets / promoting on our socials. Marketing would also give statistics on volume of products in promotion sold, click through rate / views / audience. All highly sought after statistics.

    Grey market importers would have products at a cheaper buy price but would not qualify for scanback.

    One person from my team had committed a PO for the wrong quantity of a product (100 units instead of 10)

    But due to our good relationship that brand helped us run a promotion on that product which ended up being exclusive to our stores and moved lots of flight sticks. We wouldn’t have that kind of support if we were purchasing from a grey market importer.

    The other side of retail is a fun experience, but for hardly above minimum Australian wage it wasn’t worth the stress.

    Edit: Speaking of LOGI, they were a great bunch to be on the good side of. New release products had stellar margins for our stores, as long as we kept on the MSRP, not following MSRP would lead for us not not receive initial batches of stocks on future launches.