free live chat with hot salesmen!!

By Todd Stadler · Friday, March 16, 2001 3:29am

I looked into buying a scanner the other day. HP has a deal with Intel whereby Intel employees get "employee purchase program" prices on HP products. But all the scanners I was looking at didn't seem too discounted. On a whim, I decided to see what the prices would be if I didn't tell them I should get a discount. It turned out the prices were the same.

As I was pondering this matter, I noticed a link on the website labelled "live help", so I clicked on it. I was somewhat surprised when a chat window popped up with some fellow named Tomas asking how he could help me. A real person! Or at least a program that passed the Turing test. Mind you, the system wasn't perfect - things went pretty slow, and it seemed that Tomas was cutting and pasting some of his phrases in. But eventually, he helped me to figure out how to find the discount I was looking for.

As it turns out, my reward for digging this far was a $20 discount on a $200 scanner. Whee. After talking to Beeman, I discovered I could get the same scanner from buy.com cheaper from buy.com, who also had free shipping.

So thank you, HP, for paying somebody to chat with me, but maybe next time, fire him and pass the savings on to me, hmm? Or at least bother to price your employee purchase program products similarly to what companies like buy.com pay for them. Thanks.