Bought me a Dell!

[gsxr1100]

Maybe we can get a Mac there too! Opps, not gonna happen. They would have to be on Super Duper Unreal Amazing Roll back and security would TIGHT (tight I say) & walk you to your car. /forums/images/graemlins/wink.gif A free hotdog or popcorn with every purchese. LOL. I can see it now, pallets and pallets of Mac G5 as far as the eye can see.

So far at this time 643 views of these topic and 39 posts. And I think 2 people love Mac’s. That is 94.8% people are not for mac’s……. shocking…..
/forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif

 

[rswyan]

hillsider,

I never had any experience with TAMS - that came after I left, when in a stroke of blinding stupidity, the decision was made to go NAPA. The reason I say stupidity is that our company was already a warehouse distributor with it's own captive stores and buying direct for probably 95% of the product lines we carried. The ultimate effect of doing this was to reduce the companies gross margins by at least 20% .... maybe more. Significant reduction in gross margin without a corresponding decrease in expenses = not good. The company went from an expanding business, with 6 locations at it's height, down to 2. The original flagship store, which was 13K sq ft and did $200K to $300K per month was pawned off to a competitor, because those that followed me couldn't manage it.

The Triad system, which had enabled the expansion, was scrapped for TAMS, which I suspect was probably a bad move. And you are correct - the card system we used for inventory control prior to Triad was like being in the stone age.

As a consumer I don't think there is anything wrong with the NAPA - in fact I buy probably 90% of my automotive stuff there now - it just wasn't right for our particular situation.

</font><font color="blue" class="small">( then went to work for the corporate guys running a company store. Pressure was high and every time you would have a poor month they wanted to play with the pay scale )</font>
Yeah .... from what I heard from those that remained at the company after I left, NAPA really screwed us on the changeover - no or reduced credit for alot of the inventory and promises that were made weren't put in writing .... which made them subject to dispute later on.

It was just very sad to see everything that my parents worked for their entire lives pissed down the drain by a sibling who "knew best".

 

[Moon]

My 2 cents .....

No one has mentioned software and OS options to the i386 hardware. I think that is the huge reason Intel and AMD are successful. Most of my software from my old windows system will run on my new one. Also, I can dual boot and run Linux or other Unix options on an Intel or AMD system. And of course it is cheaper to buy a new Dell or whatever than a new Apple, but as many others here, I prefer to build my own. This way you have the driver disk for each piece of hardware. You know your system better since you built it and selected the components needed for your particular use (gaming, graphics, financial, surfing etc.).
Apple was still advertising the ease of setup a year or two ago. They showed how you take it out of the box, plug into power and your phone line and wala, your all set. They go after the market that does not what to tweak or work on their computers. If they had been more open with their OS to allow more software developers to port to it 20 years ago, I believe they would have a much bigger portion of the pc market. But, hindsight is always 20/20.

 

[Bird]

</font><font color="blue" class="small">( It sure beat the card file system I saw in many small parts stores )</font>

Yep, but that card file "perpetual inventory" system we used in 1958 was pretty good for its time. /forums/images/graemlins/wink.gif

</font><font color="blue" class="small">( moved into the NAPA world and they used IBM clones )</font>

In 1991 I went to Alaska and worked that summer in my brother's garage. Now I don't know anything about the technical aspects of the system, but since we got most of our parts from NAPA, the NAPA store had put a computer terminal in my brother's garage, so I could look up parts, check availability, order parts, etc. from that terminal. Pretty neat system.

 

[rswyan]

Bird,

</font><font color="blue" class="small">( Yep, but that card file "perpetual inventory" system we used in 1958 was pretty good for its time. )</font>
Without a doubt /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif ... and certainly better than nothing at all.

We were late adopters of the card system - probably sometime in the late 60's before we had most of the inventory on it. At first it was just used for exhaust parts because there were so many and they were spread out over so large an area I guess.

Before that, we had a large oak desk sorta thing with a rolltop - though it wasn't actually a roll top desk, in the true sense of the word. It took large (about 30" x 18" or so) pieces of ledger paper - I think these were used to keep some of the inventory and the accounts receivable on - but largely there was no inventory control - they would just make up an order every so often. Not exactly real efficient.

The terminal in a customers location was a very smart marketing move on NAPA's part.