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Finding Holiday Discounts on iPods?
jeffy124 asks: "I was hoping to get an Apple iPod for Christmas. Alas, it's too expensive and out of the budget. So I'm forced into purchasing it for myself. Hoping to cash in on a holiday season bargain, I've been keeping my eye on the sales circulars that come in the newspaper. I've seen plenty of discounts for MP3 players of all kinds (Rio's, Dell's new HD-based player, etc), and the iPod has also shown up. Christmas does not yet seem very merry to me. They're always at the regular $299/399/499 price, never at a discount of any sort. You read that right, it's 'for sale' at the *regular* price. Stores guilty of this include Best Buy, Circuit City, Target, and CompUSA. Why do stores do this? How often? And does anyone know why Apple has been singled out while their competition has gotten their products discounted? Anyone know who *is* granting discounts on iPods this holiday season?"
"The other day came in the mail a 10% off coupon for various items at Best Buy, including 'MP3 Players' as indicated on the front of slip. Hoping this was how I was gonna get that discount, I set aside time this weekend to drive to Delaware in order to skip out on my local state sales tax too. I turned the coupon over, and in the legal disclaimer was the phrase 'Excludes Apple iPod Players.' Needless to say, a Merry Christmas is still aways off."
I bet it sort of works like the Gamecube price. The company selling the product sets an artifical price limit. In order to be able to sell the product you have to sign a contract agreeing to the price point. So best buy must have signed some sort of agreement with apple and it cannot lower the price. Simple.
In linux libertas
Ebay iPods usually go for around $250+ .. They seem to hold their value relatively well .. still you can save about $100 bucks.
Yeah, this is pretty common. Microsoft does this all the time with their retail software and the X-BOX.
What annoys me Mail-In-Rebates. It seems like all of the advertized prices for Best Buy, Comp-USA, Staples, yada yada, require rebates. Some require two or more. Rebates suck because you have pay up front, go to the trouble of mailing them in, and then you have to wait 4-6 weeks and hope. Plus you get nailed for the full price on the sales tax.
I know this probably won't happen for many of you, but I swear this to be the truth..
:-)
I sent my wife up to Best Buy when they were having their 10% off thing this weekend. I already saw on the coupon it said mp3 players 10% off (except Ipods). I told her to take it anyways, but then she lost it, ah well - so she did take the double-your-best-buy-reward-zone coupon.
She picked up the 40G ipod, a armband case or whatever, and the extended service plan.
At the register, she gave them her coupon, and the girl working the register said "Do you have your 10% off coupon as well?", and my wife said she didn't, so the girl went to a couple other registers to find one!!! She let it go through, too.
And, my wife doesn't know what happened after that, but she started talking, walked away, and found another 10% off coupon.
So, everything we bought only cost about $520 after tax. Ahhh.. And I was going to be content getting my 800,000 reward zone points.
Even more likely is that iPod sales are good at their current price points. Offering a product for $249 when people are lining up to pay $299 for it is generally bad marketing (unless it gets them to buy something else too).
It appears, Dingleberry, that you have a disturbingly common misconception: that because only Apple makes Apple products, that makes them a monopoly. I will first give a relatively standard answer: does Sony have a monopoly because only they sell PlayStations? No. If Sony were the only company that sold gaming consoles, or held a supermajority of the market, and they actively fought to keep it that way, then they would be in a monopoly position. If Apple were the only company that sold MP3 players, or held a supermajority of the market, and actively fought to keep it that way, then they would have a monopoly and your position would be reasonable.
The other difference is that between monopoly pricing and price fixing. The former can only be done by a monopoly that holds a supermajority of the market in a particular commodity (a single company). The latter can only be done by what is commonly known as a cartel, a group of companies in the same industry that get together to decide what the price of the good or service they all sell should be. If they collectively hold enough of the market, they can keep prices as high as they want, because the competition cannot make enough of a dent in their market share to really compete.
You can be sure that even if the market share of the iPod dropped from its current level of (I believe) about 80% down to 40%, Apple would not lower the price by a significant amount. This is because Apple doesn't keep the price high to gouge us or because they're a monopoly, they do it because that's the kind of company they are: they make expensive, high-quality, high-profit-margin items that people buy because they're the best, not because they're the most affordable. In other words, they're not a monopoly, and nor are they trying to compete on the same footing as companies like Dell and HP, which always compete on price. They compete on quality, instead.
They're worth it.
Dan Aris
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