Caya

I won’t use names because I don’t have her permission and I think it would be creepy to post it without.
Anyway, I called one morning to ask about a particular model cell phone and asked about price matching — which they do. So, I told this young lady on the phone I’d be in a little later. When I walked in I said hello to one employee who, when she found out I’d called earlier immediately passed me off to the person I’d talked to on the phone. This young go getter had everything I needed in order to get my phone and plan all stacked up and ready to go.
I was in and out of there in short order for which I was extremely grateful and I was so impressed by the friendliness and professionalism of this young woman. I hope she goes far in her career with Telus because she gets it. She understands that happy customers translate into earnings for her and that’s the only thing that provides continued earnings. Good for her. Good for Caya for recognizing talent when they see it.

I’d been curious about this business and frankly went it to ask if I could take a photo of the huge poster of Pierre Elliot Trudeau with his famous quote about the state not having a place in the bedrooms of the nation. After conferring with the boss, I was allowed to do so.
I noticed some new vintage looking cameras for sale, that turned out to be low tech 35 mm film cameras aimed at the hipster market. The clerk I spoke to didn’t know all the answers I asked, but he tried his best and was friendly, and in the end, quite helpful. I think I might try out the camera that takes photos in a 360 degree rotation, more for the fun of it than the actual resolution.
Maybe not everyone’s bag, but I’ll be back!

I recently had a bunch of pics to print and thought I’d check out that cool looking shop that does that. This place was terrible. I felt depressed while I was here. The staff were all such ignorant useless downers. It took me 15 minutes of fiddling with the machine and begging for help before I threw in the towel and went to blacks on Robson to receive amazing customer service and have a great time using the exact same machines to print my pictures. I went in to caya to print off funny pictures of my cat in a dress, ya I’m a dick, and felt like an annoying idiot the whole time. It should have been a fun easy experience but it sucked. This place blows and will soon fail.

Great design, very attractive store … but … it’s a store.
Their sandwich board promised coffee’s and what felt more like a digital lounge experience which was quite alluring to me.
The execution however failed badly.
I was in the store for almost 15 minutes without anyone coming to engage with me, there was only one person in the store and they were on the phone the whole time.
Admittedly it sounded like they were dealing with a phone or cable hookup, so it was business, not social, but still … there should have been someone else there to greet me.
In general instead of a digital lounge, it felt like a roomy retail store, not the experience that I was hoping for.
While there were a lot of the phones and tablets available … none of the tablets would start (not charged? or dummy versions) and half the phones were dummy ones too …
I want to play with tech I’m going to drop hundreds of dollars on, I want to try them side by side in ‘real life’ stuff like uploading a video from it. (none of the android phones were hooded up to accounts, you couldn’t download apps or anything …
**GENERAL RANT** Why would you not have some demo accounts to setup your phones with? preload them with contacts, videos on youtube, pictures in picassa. so you can get a real feel for using the phone. not just how much it weighs in your hand. ***END RANT***
Anyway … Ya, I was hoping for more «GENIUS BAR» like the big apple stores, not a color shift on a telus store with some camera’s and self serve oversized photo ordering kiosks thrown in.
This could be so much better executed on so many levels.
**Crystal’s ideas of a lounge with cocktails after 4 and events sounds much more up my alley… I really do think you could sell technology that way even better — especially in a neighbourhood like the west end.
My Video Review In The Moment

By and large I love Vancouver, but one of the things I don’t like is how pretentious and expensive everything is here.
Upscale cell phone stores? Come on. If you put a pile of dog crap in a ‘sleek, modern, minimalist, highly glazed’ room and charged $ 1000 for it, people in Vancouver would line up to buy it.
Great city, but the people can be such snobs.
Case in point.

In my mind, I had an idea of what Caya would be like. Afterall I had been walking by often enough to come up with many scenarios:
–It’s a modern coffee shop
–It turns into a nightclub come dark
–It’s a lounge, can I get a cocktail if I walk in?
Turns out, it’s none of those. It’s an electronics shop. With lots of pretty iphone/​ipad cases, cocktail style tables full of iphones, ipads, and other devices it’s fun to browse.
The shopping experience is friendly enough, but not remarkable or unique. I was only browsing so I didn’t have much to say, until I saw a clear iphone case and pounced. With my purchase in hand, I was off, most of the mystery of Caya was solved. Ironic — their POS system looks un-​tech-​savvy… they’re PCs — what? Huh?
Then, I went to read up on them online. They’re a Telus store that supports and contributes to LGBTQA efforts in Vancouver. I like the cause, I like that some contributions from what we buy helps out the community, but I think it’s weird that I didn’t notice anything to this effect in the store. But then again, I guess that’s what websites and «About Us’» are for.
Would I shop here again, maybe, because of the goodwill part. But half of me can’t stand Telus and the other half just really wants to hang out in the Apple store… what’s a girl to do?