Buying a new keyboard via Bricks and Clicks

-
OK, I've had it with my old clunkly Dynex keyboard. Normally my typing speed is somewhere up around 80+ wpm, but with this keyboard it sinks down to around 70wpm... that's over 10% and just not acceptable when I'm knee deep trying to get ideas out of my head and into a computer before they disappear.

So I thought what I'd do is go online and see which local retailers have my product, and, more importantly, which one's had my product in stock in my local store. The only reason I would go to a Brick and Mortar site for electronics is because either:
  1. I want it NOW!!

  2. it's so expensive/heavy that I want to make sure I have a real person to yell at if something goes wrong



Off the top of my head I know I picked these stores due to their proximity and my inclination that they may have what I'm looking for.
  • Best Buy (800lb gorilla).. I have a bias toward them because it is very close to my house and I know they have keyboards I can test drive.

  • Wal Mart (close by, cheap, I THINK they have keyboards I can test drive)

  • Kmart (close by, I work for their parent company, I'm pretty sure they don't have them out where I can test drive them in the brick and mortar)

  • Staples (far away, expensive)

  • Office Max (far away, expensive)

I put the broadline retailers in the middle because my impression of Office Max and Staples is that they typically charge a premium, but I don't know if that's really true or not.

First, the raw results:
  • Best Buy results (A) 510 results, many computer keyboards, the actual type of product I'm looking for is dead smack in the middle of the screen

  • Walmart results (D) 164 results, some computer keyboards, have to scroll down quite a bit to find a computer keyboard among the chaff

  • Kmart results (A) 238 results, many computer keyboards, almost everything is computer keyboard related. Actual product is slightly below middle of screen.
  • Staples results (B) 156 results, many computer keyboards, single list, only two results immediately visible

  • Office Max results (B) 102 results, many computer keyboards, single list, only two results immeidately visible


Now for the big test. I want to now filter by things I can go and pick up right NOW.

  • Best Buy (F) there might be a way to do this, but after a minute or two, I couldn't find it
  • Walmart (A) - OK, I hate to say it (for obvious reasons given my employer) but these guys nailed this cold. Not only does it give me the UPC (which Is interesting to me for other reasons) it also tells me which stores in my area have it. Nice job guys.
  • Kmart (F)
  • Staples (F)
  • Office Max (F)

Well, this was disappointing for me. I fully expected it to be a no brainer and that Best Buy would blow me away, and for some reason, I felt certain kmart.com had this functionality, but it was Wal Mart who actually came away the winner.

Frankly, this is a bit of an academic exercise because, after thinking about it, I'm still going to Best Buy because I want to be sure I can test drive the keyboard and I know they have a big display of them set up for me to play with.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Push versus pull deployment models

-
There are two deployment models: push and pull. In a "Pull" deployment model, the individual servers contact a master server, download their configuration and software, and configure themselves. In a "Push" model, a master server pushes the configuration and software to the individual servers and runs commands remotely. While neither technique is right or wrong, they both have some specific advantages and disadvantages that you should understand when making a decision. In the ruby hosting world, an example of a "push" deployment is heroku , while Engine Yard is an example of a "pull" type deployment. In the Pull model, each server has information about how to obtain it's configuration, when it boots (or whatever the configuration triggering event happens to be) it can continue to proceed without intervention from the master server. In the Push model, because the master server is orchestrating things, it will typically need to have a c
Read more

the myth of asynchronous JDBC

-
Image
I keep seeing people (especially in the scala/typesafe world) posting about async jdbc libraries. STOP IT! Under the current APIs, async JDBC belongs in a realm with Unicorns, Tiger Squirrels, and 8' spiders. While you might be able to move the blocking operations and queue requests and keep your "main" worker threads from blocking, jdbc is synchronous. At some point, somewhere, there's going to be a thread blocking waiting for a response. It's frustrating to see so many folks hyping this and muddying the waters. Unless you write your own client for a dbms and have a dbms that can multiplex calls over a single connection (or using some other strategy to enable this capability) db access is going to block. It's not impossible to make the calls completely async, but nobody's built it yet. Yes, I know ajdbc is taking a stab at this capability, but even IT uses a thread pool for the blocking calls (be default). Someday we'll have async databa
Read more

Installing virtualbox guest additions on Centos 7 minimal image

-
I've just spent some time setting up a bare Centos 7 image to support development stripping out as much as possible. While CoreOS is probably a better choice, we run redhat in production at this point and centos is a better fit for the time being. The problem I've found is that many of the instructions available via google were written against prerelease versions or espouse manually installing random rpms instead of just using yum. While I get this "works", I'm not a huge fan of this approach and would rather do everything with the package manager. After a LOT of scouring and trial and error, I finally found the "magic" combination. The winner is courtesy of http://www.pc-freak.net/ . I've taken these instructions and tweaked them slightly for my purposes. The original poster did this on a more "full fledged" version of centos with a windows host and my instructions are for a minimal install using and OSX host (though I'm certa
Read more