(US) Major electronics retailers adding "netbook" sections

Been watching the websites of various electronics retailers here in the US (Circuit City, Best Buy, Wal-Mart) and they're all adding a special "Netbook" section as a sub-category in their laptops offerings.

Circuit city has again added the 1st gen Linux AA1 to their site. Price is $299 but it's again out of stock.

Currently the three online vendors with the largest selections of "Ones" are Wal-Mart, Amazon, and Newegg.

 

Funny, I went to Best Buy a couple weeks ago, and the ignorant sales rep in the notebook section told me there was no demand for netbooks... :lol:

 

Wal-Mart should just start selling them in-store. They sell a ton of them online but they'd sell like wildfire if they stocked them in the stores.

 

Probably has something to do with the lower commission these "sales reps" earn selling cheap netbooks. Most of them should be selling toasters. But that might be a little too technical for them.

Cheers.

 

I was under the impression that Best Buy employees do NOT work on a commission basis. When I went in there, one of the Geek Squad guys couldn't stop talking to me about the netbooks. When I told him I wanted a Linux version, I thought he was going to cream in his jeans......Jake

 

I bought my One (8GB SSD Linpus version) from mwave.com. It was the only place i could find a refurb/open box, and it was a deal. I contacted mwave when i ordered it to find out what the "open box" status meant, and was told the customer returned it because the Linpus OS wasn't what they expected. When i took it out of the box, it was pristine and included a letter from Acer saying that the only "refurbishing" that had been done was a bios update and clean OS install.

Thank you Linpus, you saved me $80

 

I'm pretty sure that Target sells them online. Costco had Acer Aspire Ones in store but on their website's netbook section its just crappy old ones.

 

I've had several salesmen so far get highly agitated when I wanted to purchase the least expensive laptop with Linux. This seems to be the norm.

"They are slow." I go to customer service to get a salesman that will get one.

"We don't have any." Yet customer service says you have 232 in stock.

So it takes an extra 15 minutes of my time to get what I want, because the salesmen want to play games and sell me some POS Sony.

 

Radio Shack is now stocking the AA1-A150 in stores only.

 

They have them in some Wally-World stores here in Texas. I've seen them at $348 for the white XP model, 120GB HDD, 1GB RAM. Specific store is the La Marque Stupid Center.

 

Here in Raleigh, NC Wal*Mart is stocking the white AAO as well at most stores.

 

I just went to Target's website and the only netbooks they have are Asus Eee PC and the HP2133 Mini-notes.

 

Yep, saw one In China-Mart this morning.

On another note, Circuit City has announced that they are closing 160 store locations among them all Atlanta stores.