This morning's Wall Street Journal reports that Dell is having trouble competing with electronics superstores in the home theater market. This is most clearly illustrated by Dell's decision to eliminate its business unit that exclusively sold and marketed products aimed at "consumers": regular people who buy electronics for use in their homes.

If you think about the experience of purchasing a flat panel HD television, you can see why this is a hard market for Dell to crack. They want to sell direct to the customer, but this means that they have to use catalogs and ecommerce to make sales and only offer a limited selection of third-party products. If you go to Circuit City or Best Buy, you can see HD sets from Panasonic, Sony, and Samsung side-by-side and make a more informed choice.

My favorite way to shop is to go to a bricks-and-mortar store, find a product I like, then shop for it on-line and see if I can get a better deal. Once in a while, you'll find a great price on an HD set like the Samsun LN-R408D 40-inch LCD HD Television that makes it worth installing yourself.

This is the kind of thing we did when I helped install a home theater with a 34-inch flat screen HD television in January. [ Subscription required to read articles from The Wall Street Journal. ]