[hinkley]

B & H photos has done right by me so far. CDW seems okay. Newegg appears to have vendors reselling stuff from Amazon with markup. And while you can filter third party out, you quickly discover Newegg doesn’t have much inventory.

[nicwolff]

Last year I ordered a high-priced item from Newegg, received a different model from a reseller, and returned it – then ordered it from Walmart and got the same different model from the same reseller! Finally CDW sent me the correct product.

[cratermoon]

Newegg went down the toilet in 2016 when Liaison Interactive bought it out.

Adorama is also good and, like B&H, you can't do any business with them on Saturday.

[coldpie]

Has any retail company ever gotten better after being bought out (thinking NewEgg, Toys R Us, Guitar Center...)? Some incentive is fucked up if decent businesses are being run into the ground.

[cratermoon]

Toys R Us and Guitar Center are among the retailers bought by private equity firms explicitly so the investors could wring the value out of the company and throw the remains in the dumpster. G.I. Joes was another. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/toys-r-...

By the way the remnants of Toys R Us are now owned by Tru Toys and they are looking to make a comeback.

[stjohnswarts]

Also to load them up on with debt from other sources and then let them go bankrupt. Which should be illegal.

[cratermoon]

Can you give an example? I don't disbelieve you, but it's not something I've come across. What do they do, take an accounting liability completely unrelated to the company, "sell" it to the company, thus putting it on the books there and off the books of the investors?

[sampo]

> so the investors could wring the value out of the company and throw the remains in the dumpster

What does that mean in practice?

[dingaling]

> What does that mean in practice?

Buy the company with loans, strip the tangible assets for cash, burden the company with the loan repayments and bail out.

Basically use the company as leverage to buy it, and then make it pay for having been bought out. It will seldom be able to do so, and eventually will stagger into bankruptcy. Both the company and the creditors lose, but not the 'investors'.

[cratermoon]

This is the best 3x5 card/elevator pitch version of the private equity playbook that I've seen. The part about making the company pay the 'investors' for buying the company is especially poignant.

If anyone never quite "got" the rancor directed at Mitt Romney for his association with Bain Capital, this should clear it up.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Toys R Us aren't exactly blameless. They were pissing away tens of millions before the buyout for their Times square megastore.

[genericone]

Low expected long term business value due to predicted market shifts. Compress all dwindling future value into an immediately extractable source of income at the cost of the existence of the business itself. Basically, squeeze the brand name dry until the brand name itself means nothing.

[jamiek88]

Vulture capitalists bleed them to death. Toys R Us is particularly sad as their business was strong.

[jurassic]

I 100% agree, B&H is my goto for anything photo or tech related.

[steelframe]

tl;dr: I expect to get something with shoddy build quality from Newegg, but at least the reviews seem non-gamed.

After a few months of lackadaisically making sporadic attempts to order an RTX 3080, I finally threw in the towel and ordered a prebuilt machine which will come with whatever brand 3080 card is in stock at the time from Newegg. I could really use the CPU upgrade anyway, and the markup on the parts isn't at all bad compared to the markup from scalpers, who I refuse to do business with on principle.

The reviews on Newegg at least seem not-gamed. They're largely, "Quality parts slapped together and shipped unprotected, so I received the box with cards and RAM modules unseated and case parts bent due to being thrown around during shipping." I'm going to end up merging parts from two systems to produce a watercooled variant anyway, so all I really care about is just getting the parts, in particular the 3080, at this point.

[SkyMarshal]

>I'm going to end up merging parts from two systems to produce a watercooled variant anyway, so all I really care about is just getting the parts, in particular the 3080, at this point.

Fwiw you still run a risk that the CPU heatsink or something similar will come dislodged during shipping, and tumble around inside like a wrecking ball, smashing up the CPU, 3080 and the other parts you want to keep.

I learned this the hard way. There's a difference between how computers like Dells that are designed for mail order are made, vs modular DIY ones. The interior parts of the former are more strongly locked down inside. They're more likely to be non-standard and difficult or impossible to upgrade, but that's the cost of making them UPS-proof (United Package Smashers).

[colejohnson66]

ahem It’s “United Parcel Smashers”

[SkyMarshal]

Haha, I've seen both actually. There used to be a website for the movement, https://unitedpackagesmashers.com/, but it's no longer maintained.

[nitrogen]

I know a couple of people who've done the same thing -- order a prebuilt machine just to get one of the new CPUs or GPUs. Hopefully it remains unviable for scalpers and thus viable for users who actually want to use what they buy.