I stumbled upon this article the other day about how Core (the distributors of Apple products in South Africa) were unhappy that one of their bigger distributors CAB (Cool Apple Buddy aka the Apple store in Sandton City) was no longer selling Core products and rather brought in the stock themselves. CAB basically felt they were losing business due to the poor delivery time of stock by Core.
I must wholeheartedly agree with CAB, Core is one of the worst companies I’ve ever had to deal with and this is assuming you can ever get hold of them. When I was told to phone them about getting my HSDPA modem working they basically had no recourse for me and told me to bring in the laptop. Sure, I understand it’s hard to diagnose over the phone but that’s just indifference on their part. They could have at least given me some generic steps to try fix it. Core knows they are the only distributors and frankly don’t really care about customer service. Why should they, you have to buy from them either way.
Whining about the Core situation aside, I think it’s rubbish that they should have to be the only company bringing in Apple products and if CAB wants to get the products from a different source then good for them. The problem is however that whether you walk into a CAB store or a Core store you’ll pay the same price for your Mac products. One would hope that CAB could lower their prices somewhat considering if they are importing the products themselves there should be some cost savings.
It seems that despite the distributor South African consumers are going to get shafted with regards to price. So ultimately let Core and CAB fight it out, once one company wins we’ll just get to pay more than we currently do to get our Apple fix.
Such is the life of a South African Mac lover.
Enjoy this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed.