Why Amazon Rules Retail

My wife’s ThinkPad, which runs Vista Business, would benefit from an upgrade to Windows 7. So over the weekend, I stopped by my local Micro Center to pick up a copy of Win 7 Professional. I had to scrounge around the store even to find a Windows display, but eventually I located a copy in a forlorn corner.

When I took it to the register, the price came up as $299. I told the cashier I wanted the upgrade version, not the full install. She looked at me blankly, then turned to a young man, apparently a supervisor of some sort. He asked me where I had found the package I had, and when I said in the software department, he said I’d have to go back and talk to someone there. If there had been anyone there I would have talked to them in the first place, so I left the software on the checkstand and headed home.