[geeks] So I went to Best Buy today...

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: "Geoffrey S. Mendelson" <gsm at mendelson.com>
>Date: 2008/04/06 Sun PM 11:53:25 CDT
>To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: Re: [geeks] So I went to Best Buy today...

<snip>

>To be honest, how much do you think they make on a $500 laptop? 

Very little - it is, I assume a loss-leader for them, designed to get consumers in the store to be upsold.

>The people
>buying the recovery disks, antivirus software and other "tweaking" service,
>subsidize your low prices. I'm sure if you had not shown them the website
>with the lower price, you would have been charged $50 more, which may have
>been more than their markup at $500.

Actually, the cash register rang me up at $499 without any overrides, it was just that the paper sales flyer had the higher price...

>The reason they did not try to "sell you up", is that they wanted you to
>get out of there as quickly as possible so you did not tell the people
>waiting with you to check the website before buying. 

I actually decided to not try and save folks ahead of me from being upsold/etc. The laptops the two folks ahead of me bought (the woman bought a $750 AMD-based laptop and the fellow bought a $999 AMD-based laptop) were, I suspect, already upsold on the laptop.

I honestly think if there was a "reason" for not trying to upsell me was that in addition to my laptop, I also bought an Express Port/34 eSATA expansion card for $15.95 - that gave me a different profile than someone buying their first computer I suspect...

Lionel