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Comment by all_blue_chucks | Hacker News Reader

Have you ever tried to buy tech at a B&M store? They will have obsolete products that have been on the shelves for years listed at the original MSRP. I'm sure there are exceptions but this is generally terrible advice.

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Those applies for only shitty B&Ms.

In Asia there are a lot of serious vendor. Sometimes B&M prices and stock availability here is very competitive with online offering.

B&M is still good for me when I can't wait for shipping or risk postal damage. It's also convenient to have a face I can look at whenever I would like to dispute something FAST. Especially disk storage products.

If possible, Micro Center or Frys. Frys is somehow profitable but with dwindling stock at every California/Nevada location I’ve been to recently (maybe an indicator of higher prices?), but Micro Center is great.

There was a big thread about Fry’s a few weeks ago. Apparently the story behind the empty shelves is they’re having contract issues with suppliers.

That's the line they're giving out, anyway. I'm curious to see if it's just a ruse to keep some employees around and keep customers coming in paying full price as they clear the shelves before something else like complete shutdown.

It's weird, the shelves are as empty as you could hope for in a liquidation scenario and there's just crap left. Continuing to pay rent to try get rid of a few hard to sell pieces of old tech or low value items like phone cases is definitely past the point of being sensible.

So I think someone in management genuinely believes suppliers will come around to supplying them goods with payment on sale, despite all evidence to the contrary

I suspect they actually own some of their buildings and have for some time, starting from way back when property values and mortgages were lower. Or at least "own" in the usual sense of being the owner of the mortgage. Which would maybe? give them a few months more comfort zone in that they aren't paying that extra margin of current market rents to a landlord, at least in those cases where they own.

Ya, contract issues for a very specific reason. They are trying to switch to a full "consignment" model. So they want the manufacturers to give them all the inventory for free and they'll just return what doesn't sell later. So manufacturers are likely very disinterested in that model.

BestBuy will price match Amazon. So getting the real deal sounds better.

You local Best Buy will also probably have 5 hard disks total. The chances of getting exactly what you want (looking at the list in the linked site) is minimal.

Hard Disks sure, but I've gotten a reasonable choice of SSD's even one that was faster than any SSD I've owned thus far.

It's really easy for Best Buy to stock Samsung SSDs and therefore offer you something faster than anything else you've ever owned. But that doesn't mean you aren't overpaying by at least $40/TB compared to a good Amazon or Newegg price on an almost-as-fast drive from a smaller brand.

It wasn't a Samsung SSD, I don't really buy Samsung since it seems overpriced and overhyped most of the time, unless I catch a sweet deal. I had bought a Sandisk that was actually more performant than I anticipated, it was noticeable immediately after installing Linux on it.

Nah, your local Best Buy is the best place to buy shuckable WD drives on sale. You can get 8TB for $120 pretty easily.

I've walked out with 8 drives at once, but they usually have tons of the Elements in stock.

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