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Anti-bargain

September 29th, 2007 · Posted by Skuds in Life · No Comments · Life

Two examples this week of why you do need to act on impulse when you see something you like for sale at a good price.

First is the Creative Zen Vision M 60Gb mp3 player.

For what seems like months I have been tempted by Amazon promoting this gadget for £159. Its such a good price I considered getting one even though my 3.5 year old iRiver is still going strong. I was even secretly half hoping the iRiver would break down.

The other day my mind was made up when it suddenly jumped to £185 and I felt I had missed the boat. Then a day or two later it was over £200 and last week it was £385 on Amazon. That was a silly price – £140 more than the RRP and twice the price of an iPod.

I am no fan of iPods and would gladly pay a small premium to not be tied into iTunes but if I didn’t have a functioning mp3 player I could not justify paying that much over the odds even though I do prefer the Creatives for all sorts of reasons.

Today I had a look and the Creative is down to £221 – or £189.99 on Play.com. The pricing for mp3 players looks to be totally screwed and extremely volatile. You can find websites offering the 30Gb Creative for £70 more than the 60Gb and an 80Gb Apple for even less than either.

All confusing, but not too frustrating as I am still happy enough with the iRiver. (Put a 60Gb version of that on sale for any price and I would snap it up. Why have they stopped making larger capacity machines?) What is really frustrating is My Name Is Earl.

The box set of season 1 of MNIE has been in Sainsburys for ages, priced at just under fifteen quid. A real bargain, but I am always officially banned from treating myself to anything in the month or two leading up to my birthday just in case.

Today I discovered that nobody noticed all the not-so-subtle hints I dropped about how brilliant My Name Is Earl is. So I was free to get it. Went into Sainsburys and its no longer there at all. It is still available everywhere else for £25 though.

The difference is only a tenner, but its the principle – that tenner is a 66% increase over the Sainsburys price.

Mind you, if any box set is worth £25 then its My Name Is Earl which is turning out to be one of the funniest things I have seen. I don’t even care that all the leading actors, writers and producers are all Scientologists.

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