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Comment by MR4D | Hacker News Reader

I bought my son a used 3060 Ti at the beginning of February from Micro Center for $512 + tax. It had been in their display machine before that, and never out of the store.

From a timing perspective, I got totally lucky. I happened to be there twice in one day, and just got lucky that he had dissembled the machine a few minutes before I walked in (he was still putting it together with updated parts when I was at the counter). Prior to that, I had looked everywhere for weeks (it was supposed to be for Christmas!) without any luck.

Patience and luck in my case. And the Micro Center has earned me as a loyal customer.

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*Patience and luck and a willingness to pay way over MSRP for a display model

Yeah there are ways to get cards, and I'm not gonna fault anyone for interacting with the laws of supply and demand, but it seems a bit disingenuous to heap praise and declare loyalty to MicroCenter for this. A scalper 5 minutes ahead of you would have been given the same "deal" and that card would have been on ebay within the hour and mining ETH inside of a week, just like the rest of that store's inventory.

Linus from Linus Tech Tips said that he has insider information that the problems weren't caused by miners at all, it's just that more people are working from home and need new hardware: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3A4yk-P5ukY

Very few people need a GPU for work.

There might be a few, and there might be more gaming, but seriously? If I was a miner and could get RTX 3xxx at 100-150% MSRP, I'd be buying them non-stop.

A 3070 at MSRP pays for itself via mining in, what, 10 weeks? And the risk of it being worth less than MSRP any time soon seems tiny.

TL;DW: GPUs are competing for chip production capacity of 2 producers, who seem to be already in stress because of generally increased demand caused by the current situation, so they can't handle demand even a tick above the previously reserved capacities.

I'm a teacher streaming from home. There's more of us.

Great suggestion! I watched it a few hours ago. Fantastic episode, and I highly recommend anyone interested in GPUs watch it!

> A scalper 5 minutes ahead of you...

I’m not going to argue this point for obvious reasons, but short of the work that say, LLTstore is doing, what should MicroCenter be doing?

You’ve got a valid point, which is probably why all of us gamers are so pissed off - we’re all helpless. It’s so insane that I’m actually considering trying to find a 3080, and then selling his Ti. It would take a bit of work, but if I could find one, it would be worth it, and we might have an extra year of life out of a more powerful GPU.

> what should MicroCenter be doing?

I'm not suggesting MicroCenter should be doing anything other than moving product. If they can mark it up and still sell it, I can't fault them for it. They don't owe me anything. At the same time I don't think it's right to praise them for it which is what my reply was criticizing; they didn't do anyone any favors here.

I wish MicroCenter would work on their customer experience. I go to one in Cambridge, MA to buy IoT supplies and it's never organized (despite signs saying "this area stocked by XYZ"), popular products are behind the service counter and not even in the main area (so you have to ask) and associates rush to stick their associate ID barcode on your merchandise and usually at check out another associate takes it off and puts theirs on. Perverse incentives for sales staff and poor customer experience.

But they often do loss-leaders on popular things to get folks in the store, so...

Wait, has the Cambridge Microcenter had 3080s recently? When do they restock?

I've heard of lines in the morning at other Microcenters but don't know much about the one next to me.

I really wish I had a micro center near me. I miss them. I also miss the Frys of (late 90's early 2000's).

It's cool though that microcenter is doing the opposite of other vendors and doing an in store only thing for cards.

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