BCE, fresh off a botched deal with the Ontario Teachers Pension Fund, which left about $1.2B cash in their pockets (that was merely the penalty for the deal not going through, don’t let anybody tell you the Ontario Teachers are not having a tough time), just purchased 750 The Source (formerly Radioshack) stores across Canada. Knowing how competent the people staffing regular Bell stores are, the level of service just dropped from ‘friendly and knowledgeable’ to ‘rude and incredibly brainless’. The personnel went from crusty middle aged balding men who knew what colour wire needed to be connected to what terminal for any given brand of 20 year old radios, to hip-looking twenty-somethings with their ear glued permanently to a cellphone and their eye on the iPod, who are more worried about their hair than their bottom line and spell “your” as “ur”. Great.

Next time you go into one of these Bellshacks and try to buy a battery, good luck with getting out of there in under two hours and with the right product.