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IT's Most Outrageous Markups?
masteritrit asks: "I have seen some really outrageous markups from IT companies. Cisco sells memory for a router I have for $1500 bucks and I bought it directly from Kingston for $56 bucks. I also had someone at storagetec accidentally reveal that their standard markup is 700%. What are some examples of this that others have seen and how do you feel about it?"
Here...
Would everyone who just though of mentioning SCO's markup of 699% please add their post below.
And before the trolls turn up, I know 699% of nothing is nothing, but it was the best I could do at this time of night.
I heard they profit 0% of their console sells, sometimes a markdown of 20%, 25%.
When i was a salesman at compusa (a few years back) we sold USB cables for $30+ when they were only $5 or so at cost. I've seen grocery stores selling them for much less than $30. The same thing went for parallel printer cables.
However, there was one adapter (PS2->AT or serial->ps2, i forget which) that we charged ~$50 for when it was listed as $.50 cost in the computer... 1000% profit is not bad.
The best deal is the one that brings the most profit.
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Heavily armed, easily bored and off my medication.
CAT5 cable usually selling at a 300% markup in "big box stores" compared to other small PC retailers.
Audio cables named after any sort of "Monster."
Mousepads are probably at a 1000% markup.
Do extended warranties count as markup?
Well, pretty much any cpu you buy is going to be marked up pretty heavily.
It costs Intel or Amd the same whether they are making a 1ghz or a 3, the differences in prices are just their way of recouping development costs.
And of course, specialty cpus are marked up anymore, for example Athlon MP's.
I would expect such blatant racism on Fark, but on Slashdot? Mods please ban this asshole.
I say let them charge wahtever they want because the market will decide what the price should be. When something is over-priced there will always be a competitor that is hungry enough to take a smaller profit margin. Of course this is null and void when there is a monopoly in the market.
We all love Adam Smith - with some rules.
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
But XML markup is the worst!
Karma: Marginal (mostly due to the border around the website)
I used to work at zones several years ago, and the standard markup varied. They often sold their full computer systems at a loss, and so had to recoup the cost by marking things up _a lot_ . A $1.50 ethernet cable would balloon up to $30 or more sometimes. Of course you'd also buy the computer at $100 less than retail though. That's pretty standard practice. CompUSA does the same thing. Sony sells their playstations at a loss as well, then inflated the costs of accessories to stay in business. Your example is pretty freaking extreme though. I wonder if it was just a fluke. I saw things like that at zones all the time. All of a sudden a $1,299 computer would be $12.99.
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
I would absolutely *LOVE* if someone could tell me how much both USR and retailers are making on external 56k modems:
Future Shop (Canada's version of Best Buy) is selling an external one for $170 CAD (~$120 USD?). It seems hard to believe that the price of one hasn't come down in what, over half a decade?
Here's an opposing view (Scroll down to the second-last letter - lucky b'stard).
Consultancy: If you're not part of the solution, there's money to be made in prolonging the problem
Though the markup on markup can be pretty horrendous!
One million dollars.
That $1,500 Cisco memory is, I think, good for everyone - it contributes to Cisco's bottom line by ripping off the ignorant and lazy, thus keeping them from having to raise prices for the rest.
But for a contrasting situation: about 5 years ago I worked for a dominant office-equipment supplier in the Rocky Mountain region (name left out not to protect the guilty, but to avoid self-embarassment...) in their PC/printer repair depot. We outsourced our monitor repairs, and would routinely double whatever the price was - whether it was mainly parts or labor - for no good reason other than that we could. We sold Laserjet fusers for a decent markup - until we changed from geniune HP to remanufactured parts, and kept the prices the same... so a $180 fuser we sold for $215 became a $40 fuser sold for $215... I could go on. They did that 'cos they were sleazy, and I hated working there.
I've been on the lookout for a 4-pin to 4-pin Firewire cable at a decent price for awhile now; usually I see them for a ridiculous $40-$50 most places. Recently when my need became more urgent, I swung by Fry's and found them for $9. That's just a case of buyer-beware - if you're concerned about saving money, make sure you're not being fleeced before plunking down your cash. Do some legwork if the price difference is worth your time.
Another example: inkjet printer makers sell the printers at a loss and make it up by selling carts at inflated prices. That's OK by me, when alternative sources for carts and ink are available. When they started putting ICs into the carts to prevent "counterfeiting", that's where I draw the line, and it turns out that inkjet printers from 2-3 years back (available for dirt cheap on eBay and Craigslist) still work just fine with $3 cartridges (also from eBay)....
The really outrageous markups are in the financial business anyway. $35 because they let your credit card payment check sit for 3 days before processing it? Bah!
Perfectly Normal Industries
Numerous stories have been posted on this - I'm surprised "Printer Ink" isn't half of the posts here...
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Printer ink/toner. 'Nuff said.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
I've seen this before.
You receive some rather neat toy from your distributor for selling X widgets during their promotion. Said toy is rare and unusual and sought after.
Boss takes said toy and sells it in the store as a 'Collectors Item' for pure profit.
None of which you get.
I'm sure that happens all the time elsewhere too.
AMD/Intel *do* incur higher costs for the faster chips of the family.
When a wafer of silicon comes out of the FAB, they test each chip to see what it can handle. Chips that can only do perhaps 1200Mhz without failure will get marketed as 1 Ghz, 1.3 Ghz as 1.1 Ghz, and so on. This ensures the chips are reliable at their standard clockspeed, and ensures the 3Ghz+ wafers go to the higher end parts.
Obviously, they only have limited control over this process, and when demand for a lower-speed chip increases, they may have to put a 1.3, 1.4, or 1.5Ghz rated wafer down as a 1GHz part, since people want to buy the 1GHz parts (this is also, BTW, the reason why sometimes the 1.4Ghz part is chaper than the 1.3Ghz).
As the speeds increase, you have continually smaller quantities of silicon that will run at the higher speeds, meaning if demand exceeds your supply of these parts, then you have to keep the prices higher to keep that demand in chack, and also because you may end up tossing out large parts of the wafers (This, also, is an issue when people purchase 1.4/1.5Ghz chips, and they have a glut of lower-rated silicon. They keep quite a bit of it, but eventually if the surplus grows to great, there's nothing to do but dispose/recycle the stuff).
So there *are* costs incurred with going up in speed.
...for one of our AIX RS/6000 servers. I forget the exact quote amount, but it was, I think, around $1,200 for 512MB. We bought the same RAM from Kingston for less than $400 (after the IBM rep almost blew his top arguing that if we didn't buy from him, we'd void the warranty).
So we crack the case to put in the new RAM, and what do we find? The *exact same* Kingston RAM module is already providing us with our first 512 MB of memory. Priceless.
Just for giggles when a hdd in one of laptops crapped out, I went to HP's website to find out what they had to offer, i found this $1073.00 10 gig laptop hard drive.
I just about fell off my chair laughing so hard. I think we bought an equivelant hdd through compgeeks for
wang33
PAGERANK++ Robsell.com
Don't forget the cost of doing buisness. If you count only the cost of food, McDonald's as a 200% markup. Food and labor is about 100% (these two were about half the costs in the resteraunt I worked at). However after all the other little things add up, profit of 5% not obtainable no matter how hard we tried, and some months we lost money. Overhead gets you every time...
I used to work at StorageTek, and I don't know if I believe the 700% markup. Only because how do you figgure that. If just the cost of making the parts, that is beliveable. They don't have a lot of volumn (compared to say DELL), but all their systems have a lot of engineering in them, so they have to recover a lot of costs from each sale. I know many smaller products never directly became profitable, and were only worth it because they helped drive a bigger sale.
I don't think Cisco wants to be in the RAM buisness. They are used to selling either big machines for a lot of money, or small machines to re-sellers. Call them up for a $50 ram module, and they may have more than $50 in overhead just to answer the phone, get it off the shelf, and ship it. The salemen selling it may require more than $50 himself just to make it worthwhile to write up the stupid order. (time is money, and that time could be spent trying for a big sale) Call them direct and you might get a vice president more inclined to sell in lots of 1000 than single lots, and you have to pay for his time. Their processes don't support selling memory, but they know they have to. They charge to make up for their process, plus some extra to either profit or make you go elsewhere. (one other point is they have to keep memory for old systems around ever after it is hard to get, you may be paying for an assumption that they have made their last order of that part and have to conserve inventory)
Buisness is complex. That doesn't excuse you from not looking for the best value. Don't buy the expensive parts if a cheap one is just as good. Unless your time itself is worth more than the effort it would take to find a cheaper supplier. If you are a high level executive, getting memory from Cisco may be a better use of your time than searching for memory suppliers. I could find them on google and 5 minutes latter have the order done, but if you don't do that I could see it taking 20 mines, which means the executive would need to make $250 an hour - cheap for a CEO. (though why a CEO isn't telling an underling to do the job I don't understand - something they should know how to do in one minute)
I was in Future Shop yesterday since my printer had run out of ink. They wanted $90 for a colour cartridge, and $40 for a black cartridge. Damned if I'm paying $150 (when tax is included) for a small capsule of ink that's going to last me maybe two months...
I ended up buying those do-it-yourself ink kits where they give you a couple of syringes and some containers of ink. It was cheaper, but, clumbsy fool that I am, I ruined my shirt...
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Hello, Slashdot user. My name is Dr. Sbaitso. I am here to help you.
because I usually just pay the price at the local retail store because it's close and easy, but the markup on guitars is RIDICULOUS. You can talk guitar salesmen down thousands of dollars. Sometimes, I like to go in, haggle my way to under a grand for a (marked as) $3000 guitar, then walk out. The salesmen expect that kind of thing, but it's fun to spend a day playing very expensive guitars, and if you look serious they show you the *real* nice ones. Fun.
In any business, especially a retail store, the per-item overhead can dwarf the wholesale/bulk price of an item. You are paying for ordering, inventory, floor space and other costs. With a vendor like Cisco or Sun, they have to specify, test and qualify the item, assign it a part number, stock it in warehouses, provide packaging and documentation, etc.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
And this doesn't even take into account the enormous profit the drug companies make on that product that costs them less than pennies to produce. You wonder why health insurance costs so much.. here's part of it. This is a case of markups in a situation where the consumer has little choice (if they are bedridden in a hospital). And this in an industry that is supposed to be helping people (and a non-profit at that). Abuses aren't necessarily limited to the likes of SCO. At least most of the time in the IT industry you have a choice as a consumer.
Those of us that used to make redboxes ended up paying 25 bucks for the 33 memory tone dialer and another 5 for the new quartz timing crystal. When I was busy making and selling about 50 a week, I found a better source at asiansources.com and started getting them from the same place RadioShack ordered them from for 3 bucks a piece quantity 100 without the lame RadioShack logo on them. The quartz timing crystal I found for 49 cents a piece but I can't remember where. It's been too long. I never could find a great price for mercury switches (the only way to do it right) but my boxes looked completely normal from the outside so they were worth it. :)
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
True, but it doesn't take many comptuers to cost CompUSA a lot of money. And Comptuers themselfs are not nessicarly the target. I couldn't shiplift a 19 inch monitor if the gaurd is paying attention, but a 2.5 inch harddrive, memory module, or even the latest sexy teenie bopper CD fits in my pocket. Do your crime in winter and a lot will fit under a coat. (I hope you get caught if you try, it drves the prices up for honest people)
I think cables are marked up so much mostly because the market will bear it. If I need a cable I need it now (or I'd go to the internet for a cheaper place), and I'll pay $25 to get my gadget working before my friends (yeah right...) get here. However there is also the issue of shelf space, cables don't seem to be very high volumn, compared to the shelf space they take. They could put something with less markup that moved better in that place and make the same money - except that If I go for a cable and find it isn't there I might decide they have nothing and not come back. Retail is complex, and I don't even know all the considerations.
I went to buy my daughter a Compaq CPU and LCD from Circuit City. The sales guy asks if I want the free inj-jet printer. As she already has a laser I knew she has little use for it, but what the heck. I'm sure I'll find someone who wants one. The sales guy then goes, "oh, because you bought the CPU, LCD & printer bundle here is your $100 rebate slip." Go figure?? I guess I should have gotten a dozen more printer and neted the system for zilch. I'd love the free-market if it didn't hurt my head so much.
The pack might only sell for 0.25 - but they gotten for about .0025.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
I actually paid $150 for a copy of Windows. Can you believe it? $150 for an operating system? It must've cost about $0.05 for the media, plus a few bucks for the programmer who copied the code from VMS, BSD, and MacOS.
Believe me, I never made that mistake again!
best buys standard markup for large televisions is 100%... they buy for 700 your buy for 1400
Blackbox and other outfits like that have just about every oddball convertor, splitter, etc. you might ever want.
The reseller I used to work at seemed to do a lot of this kind of business. We found a taiwanese firm with an office in CA and were able to order stuff like VGA splitter boxes (still > $100 most places) for like $9.
We got tons of stuff from this place -- 1000's of printer cables and the like. If the going retail price was $25 we'd buy them for $0.27 ($0.25 for 100 or more).
Problem is we'd have to stock a bunch because they only had so much then it was wait for the next boat from China.
But we really needed the margin. We'd net more dollars on the cables and network hubs than we'd make on a $10k server, especially if it was a name-brand server.
Somehow my boss never got the idea that service is where the _real_ markup is made -- $100 an hour for a tech we paid maybe $20 an hour to. Business is funny that way.
"But actually trying to use m4 as a general-purpose langage would be deeply perverse" --ESR
Sun charges outrageous prices for "Sun" memory. You can buy the same memory far cheaper from Kingston (or anywhere else). Of course Sun gets you by saying that they won't sell you a service contract if you're not using "Sun" memory.
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
I work at a call center, doing tech support for Epson products. I actually had a customer today call, asking about the retail price for a ribbon for a certain point-of-sale receipt printer. Apparently, they were paying almost $200 for each ribbon from their reseller. I couldn't believe this, so I did a quick check and found that they were listed for sale on our website at $39.99... for a case of 10!
You want HIGH markup, go to the mall. Worst I've ever seen was at
a shop called "Bath and Body", which sells mostly (I swear I am not
making this up) bottles of colored soap. I compared some of their
prices to a reasonable retail store and determined that B&B was
charging 1000% more than the other store's price, which presumably
was already marked up at least a little. For example, B&B would sell
you a box of four vanilla votive candles for $10; they would be $.25
each at Deane's, $.20 if you buy them when they're on special.
Somebody as making a serious killing.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
No lie - we needed an HP heatsink to replace one that was (ahem) "dropped". Turns out that the heatsink costs $3 more than the processor (P3 1Ghz) itself (which CAME WITH A HEATSINK).
I just don't get it.
The manufacturers could sell a lot more of those mice if they made the interface chip Flash-programmable and padded and pre-scored the circuit board so you could snap off the mousey bits and use the rest as a generic USB interface.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
If there is one thing you never want to buy, it's RAM from Apple. Their prices are crazy!
I buy Realtek cards from Ebay vendors for $5 - $8 each, and sell them for $20-$25 each. I also buy various cables, such as USB for super low prices and mark them up to near retail. In addition, I charge $5 for just about any length Ethernet cable I make. The kit I bought was on special - 1000' of Cat5E, with a crimper and some RJ-45 heads - total cost - $60. Ethernet and USB cables are so bloody expensive at retail - buy them from Ebay vendors, guys!
A local computer shop has an extreme-beyond-extreme markup well over 100%... The retarded owner sells $2 USB cables for $15-$30 depending on if he has it in stock or not. He also sells $35 wd (to him) BB (2mb cache) 40-gig drives for $119. That is an example of the markup and idioticy that exhists in small american businesses.
Erutangis ym si siht.
- This is not legacy gear. There are plenty of people out there who still don't have computers, or are replacing older modems (the same way people are replacing older phones with the $5 Rat Shack model). The market is not exploding, but there are going to be steady sales for years. This is not a legacy market, it is ready to be a commodity market.
- Given that it is a commodity-market-in-waiting, anyone who comes to market with a good product at $35 is going to carve out a big chunk of USR's $70 modem market. Ditto the company that hits the $20 price mark. Eventually the reality of low sales will prevent the kind of radical margin shaving that characterizes RAM chips, but there's plenty of room to move down.
The other reality is that electronic gear lasts a reasonably long time. If it truly is a legacy technology and not improving, the new gear will face stiff competition from its older models. This means the price is likely to come down, at least for the careful shopper.Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
The question seems to be talking about gross markup in I.T., the problem is I.T. is a very funny business where almost all the cost is in figuring out what to buy. A particular cable or part may cost 25 cents, having someone around that can tell the customer that its the cable they need is not cheap at all.
If the part is to be installed on site the actual profit becomes much less. There seems nothing a customer loves more than wasting a field techs time with little things after the paperwork has been filled out.
Oh and for most markup I once charged a customer $300 for a 20 cent fuse for a printer. Call it penalty markup for plugging the thing into an outlet I insisted was bad.
I work for a consultant firm that charges the clients 10 times what they pay me. That's a markup.
I know it's not an IT product, but we buy a lot of water at like 5,000,000% markup.
I use a lot of External USR modems in my business (embedded systems). It pisses me off every time I have to buy one. They haven't changed in years and they still cost a fortune. Nobody needs them any more for PC sales so overall sales are low but why are them more expensive than say a TI-81? It's about the same level of complication.
Listen dudes, just because it's got a high percentage of profit, doesn't mean it's a rip-off. It's an example of supply and demand. If $5 USB cables are being sold for $30, then it's because enough people are spending $30 a piece to buy them. When people stop paying $30 a piece, the price will drop.
It really is important to understand this concept of business. Just because they can sell it cheaper doesn't mean they should. Remember, they're not just selling you small quantities of material, they're selling you a tool that helps you do a job.
"Derp de derp."
A year or two ago, a friend of mine from work bought his first computer, something to accompany his DV camera. It had a firewire card in it, but neither the computer nor the camera had included a firewire cable. Back to the store we went.
Best buy wanted $50 for a 4-foot cable. That struck me as obscenely high, so I drove around for a bit, and eventually found one at Radio Shack for $15, which I deemed acceptable for a retail outlet.
Just the previous month, another friend of mine had purchased a firewire card online (some pricewatch vendor) for $14 and it came with two cables... *sigh*
the hard drive is right on, but the cable is a bit high...but it's a convienance item...so the markup is higher.
It's both a rip-off and a sign of an inefficient (malfunctioning) market.
Say the real cost to put a USB cable into my hand is $5, but you charge me $30 for the privledge. Well, with a markup like that some enterprising businessman else should be able to undercut you and sell me USB cables for $25. Of course, he'll get undercut to $20, then $15, and the cycle will eventually drive the price down to just a tad over the actual cost to put it in my hand. This is the theoretical magic of the free market.
Of course, theory and practice aren't on speaking terms right now, so enjoy your $30 cable and your malfunctioning market.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Some businesses have insurance to cover that stuff, but they tend to fire people who make mistakes like that.
By not walking off with all the extra free stuff, you are giving someone their job back.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
From SAP to Oracle, from IBM to Microsoft. Every one of these have middle managers that do not have a *clue* about their own customers and the product they support. They throw out numbers to satisfy the whims of their own feel-good agenda that may or may not translate into a promotion.
... 50 to 70 percent! The latest debacle is that one of our projects' customer wanted to move up the installation schedule 2 weeks. And you know what number was thrown out? 300k. That's right, 300 friggin thousand dollars for the "cost" impact. Come on.
I'm posting AC because I'm afraid that my company will find out. But, the latest projects we've been working on have seen 50 ~ 70% profit margins. Do you know how insane that is?! Even during this downturn
I got on the phone with my managers and suggested that they actually quote what it really cost us. The number? 60k or so for extra people and extra flight costs. (Customer is in Asia.)
Welcome to Corporate life, where the markups let the top boys buy their toys.
-Out.
And here I thought Tru64 was dead.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Just ordered yesterday, including rather large reductions for educational institutions:
;)
10/100 MBit NIC from Sun : 350 Euros (List price is 800 !)
10/100 MBit NIC for a Cisco PIX : 145 Euros
I then asked for one of those serial cables from Cisco (to connect to their console ports)... Listed as 100 Euros, the salesman had a hard time explaining the quality of said cable to me
...has got to be ECC cache memory for DPT SmartCache/SmartRAID IV SCSI host adapters.
;o)
A single 16MB ECC SIMM (part no. SM4000/16) still costs a smidgeon under $1000. It's not just because they're EOL'd - they were always expensive.
This was just downright mendacious profiteering on DPT's part. I see no reason why they couldn't have designed for standard ECC memory.
If anybody knows where these SIMMs can be had at a more down-to-earth price point, do let me know
We sold formatted floppies for $10 a pop. This was twenty years ago mind you.
Because the OS was our own (a sweet message based V7 unix clone) there was no other way for our customers to format floppies.
Cheers,
Bill
bamph
$1000 for a date with a girl, thats outragous^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H all right, I'll take it.
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MS-Office and MS-Windows are marked up about 5-6 times what would be normal for other products. Although everything else is losing scads of money, MS-Office and MS-Windows pull in 79% and 86% profit margins. In other words, the monopoly rents cost consumers billions -- a big drain on the economy even ignoring broken patches, interoperability and security problems.
If you start looking at value, the markup for Windows and Office is much higher since their offerings are of lesser quality and more effort that comparable tools from other sources. Even when I worked for a dept with deep pockets, I simply got tired of MS stuff not working. MS Products simply are not ready for the Internet. So I upgraded to some different GNU/Linux distros, which despite the FUD and spin are easier to install and maintain than any of the Windows flavors I had to deal with. Though, lately, I've started using OS X, which is even easier.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
A company I used to do IT work for was purchasing BIOS backup batteries from our vendor for $70 a pop. Not the coin-sized batteries but the 9v-looking replacements.
That is, until I informed them that I could buy them locally for $6 each. The vendor quickly changed the price to $9.
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
Token Ring MAUs (Multi Access Units, I believe) are/were something like $300 a pop.
And all it got you was one additional connection into the ring.
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
...NO ONE should be allowed to make excessive profit except me.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
Check the contracts....
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
Anyone knows about 128MB of RAM costs around $50 or less. You could sell it at $300 and show you're insanely expensive, but exceeding $1200 is like saying we don't want to sell it to you. Its just like someone who doesn't want to sell his house but gives an insanely high price to an inquirer just in case it still gets sold. A hardware vendor is interested in selling their own IP, their own routers and other hardware and has to maintain the warranty and sell its memory just for completeness.
Since they dont want to do that, they put up these crazy numbers to drive customers away and void their warranty, else make a great deal of money. Sad thing is, too many companies don't go the extra mile searching google, yahoo and pricewatch to buy it at $50.
They're also doing that with their IOS software. For a 2501 router you bought at $100, you need a new IOS which you can only get with a smartnet contract as well as license to run it on your system, in total costing thousands of dollars. Looking closely, they're not really saying don't run new IOSes on your router. They're just saying you should copy the IOS from elsewhere without ever bothering cisco with any questions or problems, and we'll always have the upper legal hand.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
I sell a program called LinPhotofx for 350! Its just the gimp internally with a bundle of extra scriptfu, plugins and cmyk support to bring it up to par with photoshop. Yes you can get all this stuff for free but you wouldn't want to search for all of it. Theres a lot of people who think gimp sucks but a lot of people buy it when its got a better name like LinPhotofx.
I saw that Microsoft actually CHARGES money for their products. Good googly!
Now for the question...am I a troll or funny? Or just a funny looking troll? Wait...I think we all are. Crap.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
Not while I worked there (1993 to 2002), the markup on "big tube" tvs was usually around 10%. When I bought my 32" using the employee discount - "cost + 5%", I think I saved $50... Computer hardware is the same way - save $10 on a cpu, save $15 on a monitor, and save $25 on a USB cable! The markup on "accessories" is insane.
Now car audio - the markups there are close to 100%. My car stereo system cost me $1400, the retail price for everything was over $2700.
And Best Buy is a bastard of a company to work for -- but that's a bit off-topic for this thread... I'm torn between hoping they do well (for my 401k), and hoping they go bankrupt (for karma)!
Personal note to Marc Gordon, CIO of Best Buy: How long until they get rid of YOUR job?
I worked with IT director who (among other things) leased 8 port hub for $75 a month for 4 years from a company he (as it turned out later after he quit) had financial interest in.
In late 2002 I got three used IBM laptops from work. These had been bought in 98-99. One of them missed a little plastic cover in front of the harddrive. Being a geek, I looked up the FRU-number (Faulty Replacement Unit), and called our hardware pusher for a quote. He called back the next day. I don't remember the exact price, but I do remember it was more than $200 plus tax. I laughed a little, thanked him for his time, and went on to sell the laptop without the cover.
RAID cache ram is supposed to persist during a power outage. Persistent cache RAM in a RAID array or SCSI controller allows your controller to respond to sync() commands without lying (which would be dangerous) or waiting for the disk to get to the part where you can write that data. So it makes small data writes instantaneous, and can't be replicated by more main memory like cached reads can be. These small writes would otherwise have large seek times to find the right disk areas (at least on non-journalling filesystems)
I don't know this product. I don't know when it's from. But start out thinking laptop RAM for the static requirements, which is more. It may furthermore be that there didn't exist a standard part that met their requirements for size, response time, bandwidth, etc, WHEN they were designing the unit, even if one came out immediately thereafter. So they might have done this to get you a better product.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
When we bought our tv in dec the sales guy told us they were 100% and told us he just bought our 1400$ tv for ~700+tax the week prior, we were able to talk him down a bit after that slip up =) (we got 100 pulled off right there, then another 100 when the TV went down in price two weeks later.
;)
Granted sales ppl are full of it, but i see no reason for him to lie about how much he just bought the same tv for with discount (he said his was cost + 10%).
I take it with a grain of salt... im actually more inclined to belive your 10% then his 100%, so ill assume its really somewhere in between now
...maybe 20 to 50,000 worldwide, and the development costs would not be huge - pop one of the suckers open and see for yourself. What I can't imagine them doing is upholding a warranty on sawn-off devices.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I have been informed that markets are irrational. It is hard or impossible to know what something is really worth; it is worth what you can get for it in the market place. So if you can get a lot for something, or a little, what would you plump for? And if the market pays it, then that is what it is worth. There are no standards here, and very little fairness, I'm afaid, although it is complicated when you calculate the cost of goodwill, reputation and things like that.
I stole this
A glass of Coke costs them 2 cents.
It costs you two bucks.
But they lose money on their burgers.
Gotta make a profit somehow.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
All they care about is their accessory and service plan #'s
I did some work for a bank in Canada 1.5 years ago. They were still running token ring and IBM was selling them token ring cards for $400 a pop.
You could find them used in the bargain bin of a local comp store for $5.
A customer misread our invoices and made a BIG mistake in his calculations for a joint PO, sends us one for 1.7M instead of 710,000. The salesman looked at me and asked "is there any way we can factor the quote for this as markup?" which would have made about 175% markup all in, but luckily he hadn't worked it out before I had discreetly called the custoemr and advised them to issue a new PO.
We use lots of Windriver In Circuit Emulators (ICEs) at my current position. Windriver sells 6-inch connector cables for US$150.00. Now these cables are nothing special, just flat straight-through cables (sort of like the PC hard-disc cables), but they have non-standard connectors at the ends.
Anyone know someone who sells these cables for less?
Magnus.