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Where Did All The Online Bargains Go?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the mostly-they-filed-chapter-11 dept.

cornflux writes: "There's something I've wondered recently -- 'Where did all the good deals go?' It seems I'm not the only one -- Business 2.0 has an article about the noticable lack of bargains available online, today. The author covers obvious reasons (dried up VC, need for real profit) and some others (pseudo-price fixing). The one thing that was missed is the ever-increasing number of morons who will pay full-retail price + 20% for things on eBay." Note that the piece is largely theoretical -- I've found consistently better prices on the web, even recently, than I have in-store for electronic goods, as well as obscure DVDs which I couldn't find locally anyhow.

2 of 337 comments (clear)

  1. Where Did All The Online Bargains Go? by Rayonic · · Score: 4, Funny

    To JCPenny this Saturday and Sunday!

    Everything in the store is marked down 0.05%!

    (no, that is not a typo)

    --
    [PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
  2. eBayers will bid on anything, even an empty box! by studboy · · Score: 4, Funny

    There was a spate of people posting "XBox box"es on ebay -- the description clearly said "this is the box the XBox came in, the console is sold seperately." Now, I can see one or two people bidding or something, but these auctions, and there were quite a few, got over a *dozen* bids each! Into the several hundred dollar range! For an empty box!

    This got a lot of press at fark.com, so people started posting spam auctions. One was for a normal carboard box with an X posted on it, saying "this is not an XBox". It went to $130 until ebay pulled it!