Error in Pre-Black Friday Sales Ad Shaves $705 Off New iMac;
Prices on 'Wall Street' Hit Rock Bottom (But Not Due to Above)
| by Joe Leo, Columnist |
FEATURE: 11.28.07-- Last Tuesday, eagle-eyed shoppers in the San Francisco metropolitan area hit one semi-national electronics chain early in the morning to take advantage of a "one day only" Pre-After Thanksgiving Day Sale deal. When the small lines started to form, the retailer realized they had advertised a deal too good to be true, the reason for the odd rush.
The item for sale? A brand new aluminum 20-inch Intel iMac advertised for... $794.
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And consumers were prepared to cash in as well, by taking advantage of the sales.
However, one deal seemed to good to be true, and when we saw the ad for the listed item, we couldn't believe our eyes. Unfortunately, the one day only sale had expired that night giving us a stomach ache worse than the first one (we had originally planned on going to the store that evening, but for something else, and ended up not going due to a bad stomach).
The store in question was Fry's Electronics, a well-known retail chain in the San Francisco Bay Area. Most of their stores--which are mainly found in California and Texas, with other locations planted sparingly in other states--have everything you possibly could want or need. They're like a Wal-mart Supercenter style Best Buy store, or a RadioShack on steroids.
As an Apple Authorized Reseller, they also sell a complete line of Mac hardware and software (both Apple OEM and from third party resellers), including iPods. In fact, before Apple went into retail, the only place you could find Macs were first at CompUSA and shortly thereafter, at Fry's Electronics.
Case in point, on November 20th, the newspaper ad for their one day only sale last Tuesday featured at the top left, a 20-inch aluminum iMac with a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 1GB of RAM, and a 320GB SATA hard drive--a model which normally retails at the Apple Store for $1499--for only $794, a savings of almost 50% off the sticker price! ($705 to be exact!).
We walked into the Fry's Electronics store in Fremont, CA (for those that need a geographical reference, the soon-to-be-home of the Oakland Athletics... a half hour drive from Oakland) last Wednesday night to inquire about the iMac that was on sale. First we asked if they were still on sale, and second, if the sale was a mistake, considering the price advertised.
They were on sale, but only the day before, so no luck for us there. But was it a mistake?
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Hoping to cash in before Black Friday arrived, some retailers across the nation slashed prices on various items in order to get shoppers in before the Thanksgiving, well, after-Thanksgiving rush. With savings ranging anywhere from $50 to $300, and items ranging from cell phones to plasma TVs, the deals were out for the taking.