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The Micro Center in Cambridge, MA, has improved a lot over the years. When they have the thing that I want, I'd prefer to go there, rather than order online.
by neilv 1y ago
The Micro Center in Cambridge, MA, has improved a lot over the years.
When they have the thing that I want, I'd prefer to go there, rather than order online.
Also, I've never seen opened returns re-shinkwrapped and sold again as new at Micro Center, unlike in stories about Fry's. There are some wire shelves where opened returns are sold at a small discount, clearly labeled.
Incidentally, would be nice to also have a good surplus and e-cycling store browsing adventure in town. But I guess the economics are difficult, when real estate is so expensive, and most of the few customers for unusual stuff are online. (That local hobbyists could save a lot of money on shipping cost of decommissioned corporate and lab gear, or make impulse purchases they wouldn't online, probably isn't enough, I'd guess.)
- arprocter 1y ago>When they have the thing that I want, I'd prefer to go there, rather than order online. Worth mentioning that they price match Amazon I bought a CPU cooler there a few months back - the guy at checkout told me to pull up the Amazon listing on my phone so he could knock some cash off https://community.microcenter.com/kb/articles/6-do-you-price-match https://community.microcenter.com/kb/articles/6-do-you-price...
- 3eb7988a1663 1y agoHow is that possible? Amazon has to have lower overheads than a brick and mortar.
- seattle_spring 1y agoIt's not too uncommon for retail stores to match Amazon, as long as it's specifically both "sold by Amazon" and "shipped by Amazon". Best Buy does too, for example.
- fzzzy 1y agoThey hope you'll buy a soda and a magazine or whatever. They always try to upsell protection plans.
- neilv 1y agoI don't recall ever asking for a price match at a brick&mortar, even though I'm aware it's available at some stores. I'd guess most people don't. The store gets some mileage out of being known for price-matching competitors (even online competitors, where that'd be a bit much). (Well, occasionally I have questioned in-store, when a major chain shows one price on the Web, available at a specific brick&mortar location, but when you get to that location, there's a much higher price on the shelf. Now I tend to order for pickup at those stores, which is more work for them, just to lock in the Web-advertised price, rather than the switcheroo price.)
- YZF 1y agoIn Canada Staples will also price match Amazon.
- erkt 1y agoI will make stores price match anything and everything. I also look at every item on my grocery check out to make sure the price is exactly what the shelf said. I concede no ground to fine print sales expiration dates. However, I am a freak when it comes to remembering these things after a decade of business purchasing and I did my fair share of taking advantage of the consumer. I frankly enjoy fighting stores on pricing and get dopamine from a good deal and it pains me to pay more than necessary even if I can afford it just fine. I understand not everyone is like this. There was a period a year or two ago where if you leaked cookies and ad tracking to Amazon and deliberately clicked through to competing sites their algorithm would aggressively slash pricing far below MSRP. I admit I would use this technique in microcenter to get Amazon to give me ludicrously cheap pricing then turn around and make them price match for instant gratification. Retail/amazon operate at a much higher margin than most people realize.
- lotsofpulp 1y ago>Retail/amazon operate at a much higher margin than most people realize. Then why don’t their 10-Ks and 10-Qs show it? There is a reason it has a reputation of being a cutthroat business. Out of all the big retail businesses, only Home Depot/Lowes has 8%+ profit margins, and Apple obviously. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/net-profit-margin https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/net-pr... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/BBY/best-buy/net-profit-margin https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/BBY/best-buy/net-p... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/COST/costco/net-profit-margin https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/COST/costco/net-pr... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/KR/kroger/net-profit-margin https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/KR/kroger/net-prof... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ACI/albertsons/net-profit-margin https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ACI/albertsons/net... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TGT/target/net-profit-margin https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TGT/target/net-pro... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/JWN/nordstrom/net-profit-margin https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/JWN/nordstrom/net-... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/M/macys/net-profit-margin https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/M/macys/net-profit... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WBA/walgreens/net-profit-margin https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WBA/walgreens/net-... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/CVS/cvs-health/net-profit-margin https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/CVS/cvs-health/net...
- walterbell 1y agoBest Buy will price match competitor websites and printed ads, via online chat, for online delivery or in-store pickup.
- roughly 1y agoAmazon prices what they can get away with, not what their costs are. Jeff Bezos’s rocketry hobby is a testament to Amazon’s ability to extract surplus.
- kaonwarb 1y agoAlmost everyone prices that way - that is how supply and demand works. Bezos's wealth is ~100% due to stock appreciation, which in turn is tied much more closely to AWS than to the consumer store.
- sillyfluke 1y agoI think the point is Amazon cuts costs and reduces price first, prices out the competition through economics of scale, then once competition is eliminated is able to raise prices.
- kadoban 1y agoIf every person price matched every item, they'd be screwed, but: most people don't, many items just can't be, and if eg you're price matching a $20 cpu cooler, you may also be buying a $500 cpu or a bunch of other components that they'll actually make money on.
- roughly 1y agoThis is also why different stores have different skus for items - that $20 coolermaster 40mm with red LEDs is cm40rl-w at Walmart and cm40rl-a at Amazon.
- erkt 1y agoRetailers will absolutely budge on this technicality, this is to disarm those that aren’t aggressive. Everyone’s retail margins are wayyyyyy higher than they want the consumer to believe and their holding costs are non-negligible.
- ryao 1y agoI thought the purpose of that was to let them avoid price matching on certain items despite having price matching policies. I have never heard of one budging on this. Have any?
- fuzzfactor 1y agoIt's also so you can't buy the "same" item a year or more later after yours is out of warranty. Which some people were known to do, and then return their old unit in the new box for a refund. So model numbers are sometimes changed far more freqently than device characteristics or features are changed.
- erkt 1y agoIt is so the manager has a policy to fall back on to say no. It is just the second round of negotiation. I am not saying everyone will play ball, but managers whose pay is a function of sales likely will. Have you ever negotiated buying a car before? Indicating you will let corporate know they lost a sale by not budging on price will almost always win the negotiation with managers who think they can just be lazy without consequence. In the standard retail environment, I have definitely had businesses price match products with the same specs but very slight SKU differences, you just have to be open about a willingness to forego the instant gratification because that is the only service in person retail provides today. That might mean actually completing the sale online and then asking again. They know when there is actually a material difference to the products. Businesses that are legit monopolies will not budge.
- ryao 1y agoStores often refuse to stock products unless they are given a comfortable enough margin on them that can be as high as 25%. That is how they can afford to do deals on CPUs to draw people into the store. Amazon also has overhead in shipping costs to customers that the brick and mortar store does not, since they receive goods in bulk that amortizes costs. They both also want as much money as they can get out of the customer, so they have little reason to lower pricing upfront unless they think that it will help them get even more money (like how microcenter cuts prices on CPUs since they expect to make it up on everything else you need to build a PC).
- fuzzfactor 1y agoMicrocenter is a surviving personal computer retailer from the DOS days. Seemed like they were intentionally flexible enough at the beginning so they would be able to go forward with any and all manufacturers that might turn out to prevail, back when nobody knew for sure. Whether the future would more strongly include Apple, IBM compatibles, or any other alternatives which have come & went. It was a "superstore" by design, decades before Walmart got there through its unavoidable momentum. The vast majority of items do need to fly off the shelf, but it's best not to purge too much of everything else. The smartest operators can actually stock a larger number of slower-moving items too. Also I have seen some affordable stock pulled from the shelves and online like smaller capacity SATA SSDs, after higher-capacity or more modern units naturally replace them as technology progresses. Looks like they mark down the less-modern units, or they won't move at all, and those can then end up at the point where further markdown would be below cost. All remaining stock disappears to a liquidator, which are more common than ever these days. Just when you thought it was really going to get good. It used to be easier to browse for "stragglers" that were too expensive when first released, if you waited a year or two those prices could be really slashed when more modern versions took over the mainstream, if you could find any stock remaining. I drive right by the one in Houston almost every week where you can see the store conveniently a block away from the freeway, only sometimes for that same reason the traffic can get so bad that it's a 20 minute ordeal getting back out of the parking lot, down that block, and back on the freeway :\ So sometimes I'll wait a few weeks before just dropping in, but it's also always been good to have when you need something right away. Except recently when I knew exactly what I wanted, a 2TB SATA laptop HDD, not an SSD for this particular PC. I still had a 1TB NIB in my storage unit from a few years ago when I picked up a couple but only used one at the time. Well, these days they had nothing. Except a few items of one SKU that was your typical modern garbagey SMR HDD, which modern SMR is miserably sluggish (you know, like a snail without a shell) by comparison to regular HDDs from previous decades (which were all conventional CMR until some SMR bozo came along). SMR is very frustrating even for long-term storage, and completely useless in a laptop. Give me a break. Had to then go to the storage unit and dig out the 1TB one I already had. Nobody's fault but mine for shopping and trying to be a consumer when it's not absolutely necessary :\
- neepi 1y agoAmazon pricing isn't always that good and they lie about the discounts and retail prices, at least here in the UK. My US colleagues tell me the same is true in the US. I've actually found that general high street crap seller Argos here tends to have better retail prices than Amazon. I can just amble on down the road and get what I needed same day pick up in person rather than wait for a delivery to turn up.
- Spooky23 1y agoNot anymore. That massive logistics network and in house courier ain’t cheap.
- dkkergoog 1y ago[dead]
- xhkkffbf 1y agoDelivery costs can be significant, especially for big things.
- syntheticnature 1y agoNot quite the same as storefront surplus, but: https://w1mx.mit.edu/flea-at-mit/ https://w1mx.mit.edu/flea-at-mit/
- don-code 1y agoI was literally just there an hour ago, buying $800 worth of gear for a Wi-Fi mesh buildout. Could I have gotten it cheaper online? Probably. But when you have 36 hours notice that you need to build out Wi-Fi, you can't beat Micro Center.
- bitwize 1y agoA company I worked for provisioned all its software dev machines from Micro Center. That's how I'd heard of it.
- tapoxi 1y agoThat store is dangerous. The last few times I went "just to browse" but I came home with an ultra wide monitor and a new PC build. I've started buying parts retail instead of online just because of how much I enjoy Microcenter. The interior does need a bit of a renovation though, it looks almost identical to how it did in the 90s.
- john01dav 1y ago90s anachronism is a perfectly valid aesthetic. I dislike the tendency to think that things must constantly be changed for purely aesthetic reasons. This tendency was intentionally created in order to sell more things -- look up the history of Ford and Alfred Sloan for details.
- ancientorange 1y agoWhile maintaining the 90s vibe is commendable, the keyword is maintain. Cambridge and Cincinnati complement their 90s aesthetic with grime and stains also from the 90s.
- walterbell 1y ago> identical to how it did in the 90s Are 1990s customers and their children in Microcenter target market? Should the next Microcenter aesthetic be 2000s, 2010s, 2020s or 2090s?
- mnky9800n 1y ago3090s.
- khazhoux 1y ago> The last few times I went "just to browse" but I came home with an ultra wide monitor and a new PC build. Wow, that sounds like a great day! > The interior does need a bit of a renovation though, it looks almost identical to how it did in the 90s. I think it would really bring me joy if I walked in and they were playing early 90s Beck, Soundgarden, Letters To Cleo...
- stutstev 1y agoConsidering New Hampshire’s lack of sales tax, I’m patiently waiting for Micro Center to establish a new presence in Nashua or Salem. The Cambridge location, while personally cherished, isn’t that accessible by car because of Boston’s stress-induced car traffic congestion. Even on foot, getting to the store is still a bit of a journey. Also, let’s not forget Massachusetts’ 6.25% sales tax. In New Hampshire, I am positive Micro Center would attract customers from all over New England and make an absolute killing from sales, potentially overshadowing their Cambridge profits. I would never shop online or in Cambridge for hardware again. But, I’m sure they wish not to jeopardize the Cambridge store or their MIT and Boston tech hobbyist clientele. Otherwise, I am surprised they have not yet acted upon this idea. But, a man can dream!
- sfilmeyer 1y agoComments like this remind me I might be the only person in Massachusetts honestly calculating my use tax for my tax return every year.
- seattle_spring 1y agoProbably one of the only people in the country.
- selimthegrim 1y agoI have a friend in RI that does it.
- lotsofpulp 1y agoGoogle maps says Salem is 40min+ from Cambridge, and Nashua is 50min+ from Cambridge, and add another 10min to 20min from other parts of Boston. Each minute of driving costs at least $0.67 (from IRS), excluding increased morbidity and mortality risks (injury from car collisions is the top health risk for most Americans). So even using $0.50 per minute of driving, if you are only going to NH to evade sales tax, that is 80min*$0.50cents = $40. $40/0.0625 =$640. So the first $640 of the purchase doesn't even save you any money (even more for most Bostonians further than Cambridge), and it costs you 1 to 2 hours of your life driving back and forth. If you value your leisure time at at least $100 per hour, then you're looking at spending at least $2,200 for the tax evasion to start paying off. I'm just positing why Microcenter will not open a NH location anytime soon, because most of its customers (who are in Boston metro) won't find that it pays off to travel to NH.
- vjulian 1y agoOh God. I wish the sales clerks would leave me alone. They’re always trying to put their sticker on purchases and proffer useless advice. Still, it’s the best in the area, and the Trader Joe’s is a draw. I bought my first computer, an Apple //gs at Micro Center at their original, single location.
- behringer 1y agoThey're not there for you, they're there for your grandma. They also get paid terribly, let them put their little stickers on. You never know when they might return the favor.
- fuzzfactor 1y agoOh yes. I'm strongly in favor of having a sticker on everything and want these salespeople to get credit for every purchase even when I know exactly what I want. Regardless if they gave me any help during that particular visit or not.
- erkt 1y agoJust ask for their sticker and promise you will put it on your purchase. If another approaches just show them the sticker, they get it.
- geerlingguy 1y agoSt. Louis? Or do other locations also pop up near Trader Joe's?