Walmart Just Gave You a New Reason To Not Buy a Vizio

One of my favorite jobs in high school was working as a salesperson at Sears. I worked with my friends, goofed around a lot, and was damn good at selling things. I started in vacuums, was quickly moved to electronics, and eventually over to lawn and garden (I don’t know how a tractor works but I sold a s*** ton of them). It’s not just that I was good at selling the products, I could convince people to buy the protection agreements, getting them to shell out 300-600 extra dollars on a thousand-plus dollar purchase. While that was easier to do in L&G, electronics was my favorite.

Getting to hang around a bunch of TVs was awesome, but the time I was there was the most exciting. Things were changing. Giant tube televisions were slowly being phased out in favor of LCD and plasma screens (Jesus Christ, remember plasmas?! Awful televisions). HD DVD actively lost the war to Blu-rays by having small, unnoticeable displays compared to the large, bombastic ones the Blu-rays boasted. I even began to learn the differences between all the brands.

I won’t sit here and pretend that any brand is wholly superior. They all have their problems and varying quality of picture and sound. Humans are fickle and quick to focus on the next thing, so I doubt anyone could purchase a new Sony, Samsung, or Toshiba and be perfectly happy. You’ll always want something bigger or crisper (or smaller and blurrier or whatever). Still, I was always trying to avoid returns, so I would often push one of the three companies I just mentioned and would steer folks clear of Vizio.

Vizio was just getting its footing when I worked at Sears almost twenty years ago. Maybe things have changed! However, given that my wife and I went TV shopping this past summer, I got to walk into a Best Buy and look at televisions to see which one I thought looked great. That can be a difficult task, thanks to store lighting and other factors. Vizio makes it easy, however, as no matter what lighting, their televisions always look like ass. Cold, uncaring, flat, discolored ass.

That was one of several reasons I would avoid selling Vizios to customers. I knew how terrible it looked. However, keeping customers away was easy because Vizios have always been dirt cheap. Even now, there’s a 55-inch one for sale at my (somewhat) local grocery store for barely $400. That is wildly inexpensive for a TV that large, even now. They can be that cheap because they are held together with chewing gum, paper clips, and a dream (at least they were when I sold them). So, why on Earth would Walmart purchase that company for $2.3 billion? The easy answer is *Yogurt voice* advertising!

Vizio developed a SmartCast program for their TVs that allows them to track what customers are watching and sell that data to advertisers. Boom! That’s it. It would feel mundane if it wasn’t inherently insidious. In a statement, Walmart claimed Vizio’s SmartCast has 18 million active accounts. That’s an insane amount of data that people likely didn’t know they were being used for. It also targets people who thought they were just getting a good deal on a usually expensive purchase. Yes, “buyer beware,” but for f***’s sake, a TV shouldn’t make you a target for sleazy advertising methods.

I understand people don’t want to break the bank on a television. However, unlike when I sold them, that is much easier to avoid now. Plenty of better TVs are barely more expensive than a Vizio. Most will still try to advertise to you and use you for advertising by keeping track of how many times you’ve re-watched the first two episodes of Skeleton Crew, but at least they won’t look like someone forced you to wear drunk goggles. Vizios are terrible, and they and Walmart deserve each other.