Wayne D's Blog

My new 500 Gbyte Seagate drive is spinning away and I now have so much disk space I don't know what to do with it. Of course there is a saga to go along with it otherwise I wouldn't be writing about it.

Last weekend Tigerdirect.ca put these drives on sale for for $109.99. Sunday afternoon I went to the Markham store and they told me they were sold out. I asked for a rain check and the guy behind the counter gave me a business card with the drive part number written on it after telling me they didn't give out rain checks. He told me they were expecting a new shipment on Tuesday. I went home and decided to buy it on their website, but when I found out that shipping was $15 I decided not to. $15 shipping on a $110 product reminded me of eBay and the way people make their money there. I guess it's probably their minimum shipping cost and the $8 for the SATA cable and the power adaptor didn't raise the shipping cost that much. Tigerdirect.ca total cost before shipping and taxes $117.97.

I stopped by Tuesday night on my way to play trivia and another guy told me that their shipment had come in but that it took a couple of days to unpack, he didn't know if there were any of the drives in the shipment and I should call and ask if they had any in stock before I came over next time. This was irritating for two reasons:

1. The drive question was a featured product on the website, wouldn't it make sense to try to keep your featured products in stock?
2. Tigerdirect's Canadian headquarters are about one kilometre from the Markham store, couldn't they put a few in a car and drive them over?

I figured I'd call them today (Thursday) and see if they had the drive in stock I went to the Canada Computers website. They have a location in Vaughan that is on my way home so I thought I should check out their prices. They showed the Seagate drive priced at $119.99 but had a Western Digital Drive priced at $109.99. When I got there they had a sign in the window saying the drive was on sale for $114.99. The strange thing was that the Western Digital drive was priced at $116.99. I decided to just buy the drive from Canada Computers and not worry about the five dollars. I got the drive and the two cables and went to the check out and when the guy rang it up he charged me $116.99. It turns out that the $114.99 price was the cash or debit discounted price. Oh well, seven buck more but at least I had the drive. After he told me that he said that he'd throw in the two cables for free. In the end I ended up paying less than I would have paid at Tigerdirect.