10-24-2007, 04:46 PM
My significant other spent a few hellish months working for CompUSA. Other associates working in other such retailers all tell the same story.
Cables are marked up. And up. And up. They are the single biggest profit to cost item on the floor. Its deliberate, people needing cables tend to be wanting them _right now_, and are unwilling to wait for an online retailer to ship them, even when the price difference is 100$ vs 5$.
Thankfully, I can make my own CAT-5 cables, so I don't have to pay the grossly inflated store prices. But I saw the same thing when I was looking for a DVI-D to DVI-D cable for my LCD monitor. I got lucky, the tech guys at work had some spare.
Cables are marked up. And up. And up. They are the single biggest profit to cost item on the floor. Its deliberate, people needing cables tend to be wanting them _right now_, and are unwilling to wait for an online retailer to ship them, even when the price difference is 100$ vs 5$.
Thankfully, I can make my own CAT-5 cables, so I don't have to pay the grossly inflated store prices. But I saw the same thing when I was looking for a DVI-D to DVI-D cable for my LCD monitor. I got lucky, the tech guys at work had some spare.