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I survived my first "Black Friday" experience
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11.28.2004
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I've been trying to talk my wife into getting a laptop for weeks and she finally gave in. She's on the computer all the time writing papers and she also got an internship where she'll be working from home. The only time I could get on the computer was when she was cooking dinner or after she went to bed. Luckily, the day after Thanksgiving, Black Friday, was coming up. I figured I could find a good deal on a laptop. Sure enough, Best Buy was going to sell a Toshiba laptop for $500 with no rebates on Friday morning only. Of course, the only specs I could find on this laptop was that it had a 1.4GHz Celeron M processor, 15" screen, 256MB of RAM, and a 40GB hard drive. Decent specs on a budget, name brand computer.
I'd heard how early people get up to stand in line for these kinds of deals on Black Friday. I got up at 4am and got in line at Best Buy at 4:15. Already by that time the line extended from the door, across the front of the store and just around the corner. I was a little worried. Would I stand out here for an hour and 45 minutes for nothing?
After freezing every part of my body and waiting for what seemed like an eternity, the Best Buy employees started going through the line and giving tickets for the very popular discounted items. To my relief, I received a ticket for the Toshiba laptop. When the doors opened at 6am it was mass chaos. I've never seen so many people in one store. Fortunately, the laptop was all that I was buying. I was able to go right to customer service, show them my ticket, and receive the laptop. After receiving it I walked over the the Geek Squad area where they service computers and asked them if this laptop had built-in wireless. I was told it didn't. Kind of a bummer but not a big deal since most any store was now selling wireless cards for $10 after rebate. I also asked if I could get a spec sheet on the laptop, but no one had one. I was a little worried that I would open it up and find a lot of things I didn't like. Then I would have to pay a 15% restocking fee if I wanted to return it.
After getting the laptop home I was quite satisfied. Its performance is quite good, the screen is nice, and it just seems to have an overall good build quality. I expected this from Toshiba since they sell a lot of their laptops to corporations.
This laptop has the Celeron M processor. This isn't the old, pokey Celeron processor that is in a lot of recent laptops and desktops. The Celeron M has a larger L2 cache which really helps in performance. I've even read that its performance is very comparable to the Pentium M processor (part of the "Centrino" marketing scam) except that battery life is not quite as good. Unless you are doing some very heavy computing (and need extreme battery life), it may be better to save some money by going with the Celeron M and just buy an extra battery.
Before I conclude, I have to address those of you who can't believe I bought something from Best Buy, the company I despise. All that I can say is that this is the one time of the year when I would shop there because a few of their prices are actually as good or better than their online competitors. Notice I say "a few". On Black Friday, there were some products that were worth getting up and standing in line for, but many were not worth it. A lot of their advertised specials you could find online almost any day of the year if you searched for it. While I was in line to pay for my laptop and watching the crazed crowd grab just about anything they could find, I had to chuckle. It was a shame that they didn't know about GeekyJock.com. If they did, they would realize that they got up really early and fought the crowds to buy a lot of stuff that they could get online for the same price any day!
11.23.2004
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The featured story in the November 2004 issue of PC World was titled "Best Places to Buy." They surveyed nearly 3,500 readers and shopped 15 stores and sites to come up with ratings for buying advice, pricing and rebates, selection, and return policy for technology products. I eagerly started reading because, I, like most people want to get the most for my money and wanted to know where I could get the best deals. Boy, did I end up disappointed.
Here are the stores they rated: CDW, Dell, Apple, CompUSA, Gateway, HPShopping, Staples, Best Buy, Circuit City, and Sony. Ever heard of these guys? Of course you have. They are the companies that are plastered on magazine ads, junk mail, and on TV. After reading their first table of all the stores and their ratings, I was amazed. I shop for tech products constantly. I post great deals at the best web stores on this very website. Yet, only 2, or maybe 3, of the stores they rated have ever had deals posted on my site, or any deals site for that matter.
If you visit my Hot Deals page, you will most often see deals from Amazon, Buy.com, Newegg, ZipZoomFly, and J&R. I'm probably forgetting a couple, but you get the point. Why do I consistently list deals from these sites? Because they consistently have the very best deals. They are large, well-established sites that offer free or reasonable shipping, detailed product descriptions with pictures, and most have customer reviews.
How could a magazine like PC World leave out these sites when doing their review? I sent a letter to the editor to find out. Here's his response:
We wish we could have covered more online stores, but we wanted the story to focus on buying advice, so we limited ourselves primarily to national chains and a few large online retailers. We have covered NewEgg and similar online stores in previous articles and will do so again.
If you're doing an article on "Best places to buy", shouldn't you include the ones that "those in the know" would tell their friends to buy from? I don't buy that response at all. The excuse that they focused on buying advice is bogus on two counts. The article didn't focus on this at all. It gave equal weight to buying advice, pricing and rebates, selection, and return policy. Second, almost none of the web stores they reviewed offer good buying advice. To these stores, buying advice involves telling you that you need the newest product, and then selling you overpriced accessories to go with it. CircuitCity.com was one of its lowest rated rated web stores, but at least it has an abundance of customer reviews on the products. I love stores that have customer reviews. Who is better to give you advice than someone who has bought and used the product?
There are probably many reasons the author of the PC World article left out some of the very best places to buy tech products online. She could have been ignorant. Evidence of this is including CDW in the list. CDW is much more geared to service businesses, and their prices show it. Regular consumers should never shop there. Second, she could have been lazy. She may not know much about buying tech products online, so she chose to only rate the stores she's heard of. Finally, she may have only included the stores that are major advertisers in the magazine (almost all of them are).
I'm not saying you should never shop at the stores PC World rated. All that I am saying is that better prices can be found elsewhere from great web stores. Before buying anything, always check out the stores I listed above as well as my Hot Deals page or another deals site like Ben's Bargains or Dealnews.
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