A personal shopper for electronics

It occurred to me that it would be nice to have some­one I could entrust with choos­ing and buying electronics. There’s more and more per­sonal tech: all sorts of gad­gets, tablets, head­sets, plus home appli­ances, office equip­ment and so on. Not to men­tion spe­cial­ized needs, if you run a busi­ness, say.

Why isn’t an ordi­nary sales­per­son, or a favorite elec­tron­ics chain you trust (think online store), enough?

Store salespeople:

• are tied to their own range
• can’t dig into your needs deeply enough, espe­cially given how devel­oped (or rather under­de­vel­oped) our market is
• have nei­ther the chance nor the moti­va­tion to, say, google and read the forums about how a par­tic­u­lar gadget performs

If com­pa­nies that take on these func­tions exist, they’re hard to find: only by trial and return.

I’d like this person to find the best solu­tion to the task I set, within a given budget.

And the ser­vice has to be very transparent. An elec­tron­ics shop­per can get dis­counts in spe­cial­ist stores (and could even place orders in their own name), receive the devices and check that they work, while making it absolutely clear that they aren’t “tied” to any par­tic­u­lar supplier.

This idea is prob­a­bly not very viable, since I’m going only by my own needs. The thing is, I’m very util­i­tar­ian about shop­ping and get no spe­cial kick out of the search, the ago­nies of choice and the thrill of the first night of unboxing. Even less out of googling whether this thing can, mmm, make shawarma (wtf?). On top of that, I don’t have bud­gets big enough to make mis­takes when buying and not sweat it.

For all that, I’m not sure I’m ready to pay for a ser­vice like this right now. Maybe in a few years, when I’m richer :)

What do you say? Is this real­is­tic? Would you use it?