Saturday, March 21, 2009
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Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Always low prices.... Sometimes
I have a new cell phone and it can accept a micro SD card that can hold songs, games and pictures. I would like to store songs,games and pictures on my phone so I decided to buy a 4gig micro SD card. At the same time I also needed to buy cat food since I ran out this morning. I thought to myself, "What place might have both cat food and a micro SD card?" The answer I gave myself was, "Well, any big-box store you fool." I publicly berated myself for calling me a fool and then decided to check out Wal-Mart since it is the only big-box store within 15 miles of my little burgh. I went online to see if Wal-Mart first carried micro Sd cards and also to check their price. It's Wal-Mart so of course they had them and of course they were very inexpensive. A 4 gig card was just about $12 to be a bit more precise. So I get in my car and drive to Wal-Mart where I find the exact card that I found online. The card that was $12 online was almost $20 in the store. I spoke to a very nice sales associate and she shared that she also did not understand why this happened so much. She told me that I could have the item shipped to that same store for the online price with no extra charge. I already knew this but I decided not to.
Now I've been thinking about this ordeal and I've come to the conclusion that one of two things is going on here. Either Wal-Mart is so large that communication breaks down somewhere along the line from their Bentonville headquarters or that Wal-Mart is punishing it's customers for being unwilling or unable to research every product they buy. I believe the latter is true. If Wal-mart has the ability to ship any product to any store it would seem that they could very easily make the pricing equal not only among all of it's stores but also between it's online and brick and mortar stores. There really is no reason other than greed for there to be an 80% discrepency between prices on the same product from the same company. Always low prices? Only if you have the time and energy to find them. F Wal-Mart!
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