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- Feb 28, 2001
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Adam, I am not at all upset about a purchase from WalMart. Just about 15 years ago my wife and I were in the market for new computers that were actually decent machines. At the time, WalMart was selling HP boxes in the "Pavilion" model series. We got our machines there. They were typical over-configured systems.
Consider this in context of what was selling in the 2005 time frame, give or take a year: HP Pavilion models, with 2 GB RAM and Win XP preloaded, with MS Office pre-loaded as well as the typical HP diagnostics setup, and (I think it was) McAfee A/V. The boxes were 2.8 GHz x 32 bit for me, and 3.2 GHz x 32 bit for her. I had an NVidia graphics card and she had a Radeon card. They were $1500 price range. Hers lasted 14 years before the HD died. My XP is still running though I have limited its use these days and keep a backup of the old files on it.
People laugh about getting your system from one of the brick-and-mortar stores, but I can tell you that the power of bulk purchases applies to them just as it does for the online stores. Trust me, if you walked up to HP and said, "I'm going to buy HP boxes configured like this, and I want you to sell them to me in 10,000 lot quantity" - do you think you might be able to get a volume discount on that? And then pass along part of that discount to the customers?
I won't rag you for buying from WalMart any time. Heck, I would have bought from COMPUSA except that they didn't have as good a discount. Part of the reason why they eventually went out of business. Best Buy wasn't old enough to have as good a volume deal as WalMart, either (at the time.) The power of bulk purchase discounts makes perfect sense if you think about it long enough.
Consider this in context of what was selling in the 2005 time frame, give or take a year: HP Pavilion models, with 2 GB RAM and Win XP preloaded, with MS Office pre-loaded as well as the typical HP diagnostics setup, and (I think it was) McAfee A/V. The boxes were 2.8 GHz x 32 bit for me, and 3.2 GHz x 32 bit for her. I had an NVidia graphics card and she had a Radeon card. They were $1500 price range. Hers lasted 14 years before the HD died. My XP is still running though I have limited its use these days and keep a backup of the old files on it.
People laugh about getting your system from one of the brick-and-mortar stores, but I can tell you that the power of bulk purchases applies to them just as it does for the online stores. Trust me, if you walked up to HP and said, "I'm going to buy HP boxes configured like this, and I want you to sell them to me in 10,000 lot quantity" - do you think you might be able to get a volume discount on that? And then pass along part of that discount to the customers?
I won't rag you for buying from WalMart any time. Heck, I would have bought from COMPUSA except that they didn't have as good a discount. Part of the reason why they eventually went out of business. Best Buy wasn't old enough to have as good a volume deal as WalMart, either (at the time.) The power of bulk purchase discounts makes perfect sense if you think about it long enough.