You know everything about about current and upcoming smartphones. You know the specs, the OS, release dates, and seen videos of these devices many months ago before getting your hands on them at retail stores. The “normal” people are different. They’ll rely on retailers to recommend their phones. Uninformed sellers could be trouble for Windows Phone, as explained by a recent Business Insider (BI) article.

The BI reporter visited a local Radio Shack store to buy an audio cable, but sparked a conversation about phones. The clerk told the writer how he decides what phones to recommend to customers.

If customers want a lot of games and video, he recommends an iPhone. If they mainly want an affordable phone to make calls and do a little Web surfing, he sells them an Android. And if they are on their phone all the time for email but don’t really care about apps and games, he still sells them a Blackberry, although as he said “they’re basically going away.”

When asked about Windows Phone, the seller replied, “Well…we only carry the high-end smartphones. Windows is really old.” This is troubling.

I know the post is based on the information provided by one seller, but I have a feeling many uninformed retailers would say the same thing.

Sellers need to be informed about Windows Phone so it won’t be excluded in conversations with customers. Nokia and Microsoft will also need to have lots of their phones in stores so customers can actually test them out.

What was the dumbest thing a phone retailer told you?