Best Buy Says It Has Killed 'Showrooming' For Good

[Kelvin Mace]

89. Gosh, where did I say

"screw the elderly" and/or "screw the poor"?

Also, who is this "rich relative" you are talking about? Just about all the tech people I know are working poor or middle class. Understanding tech makes you rich? Or is knowing to ask someone with a tech background what makes you rich?

Your view of a store where "We offer the lowest prices--you don't have to "know" the lowest price before we give it to you, we just won't be beat!" is naive, since that is exactly the kind of thing that led to Mom and Pop stores dying off. Big box chains could sell products at a loss while small retailers could not. Once they got rid of the little guys, they could move on to price gouging. Cheap shit is very expensive. When you demand that a retailer provide the ABSOLUTE lowest price, you are greasing the way for moving jobs out of the country.

I live in North Carolina and there are thousands of defunct textile mills that are closed because people demanded the cheapest clothes possible. Well, they got the fifty cent socks they wanted, the lowest price possible. Now there are no jobs, because an American made pair of sock will cost you a $1.

It would be nice to live in a utopia where every price is the absolute lowest it can be, but we don't. Telling people this fact and expecting them to make an effort is not unreasonable, it is called "educating" them.

[Note: Speaking of electronics. When I started working with computers, a PC would set you back about $5,000 (about $12,500 adjusted for inflation). The main players were IBM and Compaq, and their factories in Houston, Armonk and Boca Raton (and later the Triangle Research Park in NC) were cranking PCs out 24x7x365.

Then everybody demanded the lowest price possible, and they got them. You can pick up a PC today for $300-$500 ($150-$200 in 1981 money). Of course, all of the American factories are shuttered and there is no such thing as an American made computer, of TV, or stereo, or practically anything.

There is nothing evil about a fair profit. But there can be a lot of discussion about what constitutes "fair". Cheap, however, is a death spiral. The pursuit of cheap is what has crushed our workforce and destroyed our manufacturing base.]