The Latest...

We're having half of the basement remodeled in order to have a nice place to watch movies. We could watch movies before, but there was a ghastly drop-tile ceiling, and the walls were a mess. Ugly color, hideous wallpaper border, and since the previous owners had a dart board down there, the wall looked like the back-drop of a firing squad. There were horrible, industrial 2x4 fluorescent lights, and I won't even go into what the carpet was like.

A few months ago we bought a plasma TV for down there, and once the remodeling was done, I needed to hook up all the equipment. Since the new stuff uses something called component video cables (a 3-wire cable with red, blue, and green bands) I needed to head to the store. I also needed a USB extension cable for one of the computers, so I decided to combine trips.

My first stop was Best Buy. They had a 4' component video cable, made by some fancy-shmancy sounding brand I'd never heard of, and it was... $69.99. So I looked around and found their in-house brand (Dynex), and it was $49.99. Fifty bucks for a 4' cable? That's over a buck a foot. Their USB extension cable (also Dynex) was $29.99. I needed the cable to extend a mouse, and for $29.99, I could buy a whole new mouse with a longer cable!

So I left empty-handed, and walked over to Target (it's like 100 yards away). I went to their audio/video section, where I found a 6' component video cable for $19.99, made by Sony. Yeah, longer than what I needed, but I wasn't going to pay $30 just to lose the 2'. They also had a 6' USB extension cable for the everyday low price of $7.99.

I've noticed more and more things like this at Best Buy. For the past 5 years, there have been no good prices there on anything. Last Xmas, I bought a Nuvi 650 GPS for Jessica. I got it at Costco for $299. Best Buy's price on the same exact item? $599, which is more than it was directly from Garmin.

With prices like these, how do they get any business at all?