The first of these is a location story, the second is the ol' online-vs-retail story. Both make the same point while coming at it from different angles.
About five years ago I needed a tire for my Firebird. The guy who owned it before me apparently wasn't a very good parallel parker and the right-front was all chewed up.
Being on a Firebird, it was a pretty hefty piece of meat, so I knew it was going to be a little pricey.
I first called a Cuban buddy of mine up in Miami and asked him if he had any buds in the biz, which he did. I gave him the size, he did some inquiring, and his buddy's best price was $135. Given that the local Goodyear place wanted $168, that sounded like a winner.
But then I figured I should probably call the local tire shops and ask them if they had any 'specials' going on. You never can tell. I called two of them.
"Hi, got any specials going on?"
"Nope."
"Okay, thanks, bye."
Then I noticed some tiny place called something like "Bill's Tires". This time I didn't ask about any specials, just explained what I needed. Ol' Bill fumbled around in the catalog for a minute.
$89.
The shop was a block away.
Bought the tire, it looked just the others, worked perfectly.
When it all began, I would have bet you that $89 that (1) the most expensive quote I'd get would be here in our exclusive little tropical island paradise hideaway, and (2) my buddy's buddy, who owned a tire shop up in Cubantown, would have the cheapest.
$89 instead of $135. One block away.
It pays to shop around.
And, given what we've seen in past online-vs-retail stories, this next one is a little bizarre.
My fridge broke last week. Just plain ol' stopped working. This is a 3/4-size 'boat fridge', which means it runs on 12v. A service guy came out, took one look at it, and said it'd need a specialized ($$) boat guy, and chances are it was the compressor, which goes for about $500. Add the $300 labor and you're $200 shy of a brand new fridge.
But it's okay. I really don't keep much in it, so one of those small 'compact' fridges would work out okay.
I go to the Wal-Mart and K-Mart sites and am pretty impressed at how cheap they are. They start at $130 for the real small one, then jump up to about $150 for usual size, about three feet high. For $165 you can get the biggest 'compact', about four feet high, pictured.
We have a local K-Mart here in Key Largo, and there's a Wal-Mart about 15 miles north on the mainland, but I never even considered them. As I've documented here more than once, online prices are usually about half of what the store wants.
Exhibit A:
I needed a starter motor for one of my boat engines a few years ago. $279 at the local NAPA, $169 on Amazon, zero shipping charge.
Exhibit B:
A few months ago my DVD burner died. $65 at the local Office Depot, $55 on their web site. I removed the unit, typed the name and model number into Google and some "Geeks 'Я' Us" site popped up:
$9.95.
Took a minute to install, has worked fine ever since.
Back to the fridge, I then happened to be in the K-Mart plaza at the grocery store the next day and figured I might as well drop in and see what the story was. They had both the regular and the larger model. Naturally, I wanted the larger one, so I held my breath and asked the lady how much it was.
$79.
That's compared to the $165 the web site wanted, plus $35 for shipping.
Works perfectly.
It pays to shop around.
