Teenage "Salesmen"

A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine asked about my opinion regarding television sets. I gave it to him, and he promptly discarded my input the next day and purchased a 4:3 tube set from Sanyo (I believe).
A week later he was telling me how his wireless router is "acting funny", so I told him I would come over and try to sort it out and at the same time, make it secure (as secure as wireless can currently be anyway). Turns out the router just wasn't working properly. Without going into details it wouldn't give out any IP addresses or could you manually assign any because there was absolutely no way to get into it to configure. So, he's tapped off of his upstairs neighbor's wireless network for now, which is totally unsecure and is broadcasting it's default name not to mention the username/password to get INTO the router are the defaults. shame shame.
But i regress. After I got to his place and noticed the TV, I couldn't help but poke some fun. Here's a guy with a nice new place, an Xbox, Playstation 2, and a good assortment of DVD's and he's got a 4:3 TV. Blasphemy in my eyes.
Forward one week (today) and we're at Circuit City to return his TV. I'm browsing the different sets and am snickering at the amount of differences there are between the pictures that are being fed high definition feeds. Most sets looked absolutely lousy and a couple looked ok. The couple that looked ok though were in the "Hi, I'd like to take a second mortgage on my house to get this nice display" area.
My friend comes up to me and says "I forgot the remote." I had to laugh, although this meant going all the way back to his apartment and coming BACK here....not going to happen. It was a 20 minute drive as it was so I told him to get it later and come back here AFTER we got him a new set.
The one set my buddy had his eye on, an Akai (har har), seemed like good "real estate" for the buck ($850 for a 42" rear projection), but the picture was terrible. I mean blurry terrible, not contrast/brightness/extreme saturation terrible, although it was leaning that way too. So I asked a "sales associate" if he could hook up a DVD player to it with component cables so I could REALLY see what this set can or can't do.

"It will look exactly the same."

*silence*

It didn't take much more for me to tell my buddy that we needed to shop for a set at a different store. What the HELL kind of "sales associate" doesn't want to sell you what he's been trained to sell you? The guy was obviously a moron and not only didn't put any effort into selling THAT particular set, but he didn't make any recommendations either. Next.

A mile down the road at Best Buy, we see a nice Philips 34" Widescreen HDTV for a tick over $1100. that was about $100 more than my buddy was willing to spend, but I convinced him that it was a good deal. So....next "sales associate":

"Can I help you guys?"

Me: "Yeah, my buddy wants this set."

Sales Monkey: "Let me see if we have any in stock"

almost 15 minutes later...

An older gentleman walks up and says "Have you guys been helped?" We explain how long we've been there and were afraid our sales monkey might have fallen off of a stool and broke both of his legs looking for our product. The older gentleman (Gary) happens to be the Sales Manager and is very friendly. He wrote down our model number and scurried off to the backroom. A few minutes later, he comes out, with monkeyboy in tow, and says that he doesn't have it in stock, but the Chandler store does. Er, that's 60 miles away, no thanks. "But", he says, "I can possibly have a guy bring it up here by tomorrow, free of charge. I'll call that store to make sure they have it." He told monkeyboy to ask *insertsomeguy'snamehere* if he'd bring us the set. Gary shook our hands, we said thanks, and he took off to make his phone call. As soon as he left though, monkeyboy informs us that "*insertsomeguy'snamehere* probably wouldn't do (what Gary said he might do)." He walks away to go ask him, all the while dragging his knuckles. I wanted to kick that kid in the teeth. What the hell is wrong with these teenage sales monkeys? Granted I was only at two stores, but I wouldn't spend another minute looking at TV's after today.
In the end, Gary winds up selling us the display model because the other store apparently didn't have the set although the database said they did. Go figure. I complained a little about a small visual defect in the lower left hand part of the screen and Gary knocks almost $200 off the set and throws in a set of component cables for nothing. After they leave I'm able to make the visual blemish disappear by moving the goofy looking "subwoofer" that was precariously perched next to the set :)
We bring the set back to my buddy's place and I hook everything up for him. Tossed in the first dvd (Spiderman 2), and to my disgust comes the message:

This film has been modified to fit your screen

WTF man! I want to cram that thing down his throat.

I grab Blade 2 and commence to checking out the color balance, black levels, etc. With a little bit of tweaking the set winds up looking DAMN good. I was almost wanting it...but after 5 hours of TV hunting, I called it a day and headed back home.

To Gary, thanks so much for your help.

To the Monkeyboys, you guys need a new line of work.