[arprocter]

>When they have the thing that I want, I'd prefer to go there, rather than order online.

Worth mentioning that they price match Amazon

I bought a CPU cooler there a few months back - the guy at checkout told me to pull up the Amazon listing on my phone so he could knock some cash off

https://community.microcenter.com/kb/articles/6-do-you-price...

[3eb7988a1663]

How is that possible? Amazon has to have lower overheads than a brick and mortar.

[roughly]

Amazon prices what they can get away with, not what their costs are. Jeff Bezos’s rocketry hobby is a testament to Amazon’s ability to extract surplus.

[kaonwarb]

Almost everyone prices that way - that is how supply and demand works.

Bezos's wealth is ~100% due to stock appreciation, which in turn is tied much more closely to AWS than to the consumer store.

[sillyfluke]

I think the point is Amazon cuts costs and reduces price first, prices out the competition through economics of scale, then once competition is eliminated is able to raise prices.

[ryao]

Stores often refuse to stock products unless they are given a comfortable enough margin on them that can be as high as 25%. That is how they can afford to do deals on CPUs to draw people into the store. Amazon also has overhead in shipping costs to customers that the brick and mortar store does not, since they receive goods in bulk that amortizes costs. They both also want as much money as they can get out of the customer, so they have little reason to lower pricing upfront unless they think that it will help them get even more money (like how microcenter cuts prices on CPUs since they expect to make it up on everything else you need to build a PC).

[fuzzfactor]

Microcenter is a surviving personal computer retailer from the DOS days.

Seemed like they were intentionally flexible enough at the beginning so they would be able to go forward with any and all manufacturers that might turn out to prevail, back when nobody knew for sure.

Whether the future would more strongly include Apple, IBM compatibles, or any other alternatives which have come & went.

It was a "superstore" by design, decades before Walmart got there through its unavoidable momentum.

The vast majority of items do need to fly off the shelf, but it's best not to purge too much of everything else. The smartest operators can actually stock a larger number of slower-moving items too.

Also I have seen some affordable stock pulled from the shelves and online like smaller capacity SATA SSDs, after higher-capacity or more modern units naturally replace them as technology progresses. Looks like they mark down the less-modern units, or they won't move at all, and those can then end up at the point where further markdown would be below cost. All remaining stock disappears to a liquidator, which are more common than ever these days. Just when you thought it was really going to get good. It used to be easier to browse for "stragglers" that were too expensive when first released, if you waited a year or two those prices could be really slashed when more modern versions took over the mainstream, if you could find any stock remaining.

I drive right by the one in Houston almost every week where you can see the store conveniently a block away from the freeway, only sometimes for that same reason the traffic can get so bad that it's a 20 minute ordeal getting back out of the parking lot, down that block, and back on the freeway :\

So sometimes I'll wait a few weeks before just dropping in, but it's also always been good to have when you need something right away.

Except recently when I knew exactly what I wanted, a 2TB SATA laptop HDD, not an SSD for this particular PC. I still had a 1TB NIB in my storage unit from a few years ago when I picked up a couple but only used one at the time.

Well, these days they had nothing. Except a few items of one SKU that was your typical modern garbagey SMR HDD, which modern SMR is miserably sluggish (you know, like a snail without a shell) by comparison to regular HDDs from previous decades (which were all conventional CMR until some SMR bozo came along). SMR is very frustrating even for long-term storage, and completely useless in a laptop. Give me a break.

Had to then go to the storage unit and dig out the 1TB one I already had.

Nobody's fault but mine for shopping and trying to be a consumer when it's not absolutely necessary :\

[kasabali]

I don't think 2TB 2.5" CMR drives exist. At least this was the case few years ago and I doubt they invest in development of 2.5" platters anymore.

[neilv]

I don't recall ever asking for a price match at a brick&mortar, even though I'm aware it's available at some stores. I'd guess most people don't.

The store gets some mileage out of being known for price-matching competitors (even online competitors, where that'd be a bit much).

(Well, occasionally I have questioned in-store, when a major chain shows one price on the Web, available at a specific brick&mortar location, but when you get to that location, there's a much higher price on the shelf. Now I tend to order for pickup at those stores, which is more work for them, just to lock in the Web-advertised price, rather than the switcheroo price.)

[YZF]

In Canada Staples will also price match Amazon.

[erkt]

I will make stores price match anything and everything. I also look at every item on my grocery check out to make sure the price is exactly what the shelf said. I concede no ground to fine print sales expiration dates. However, I am a freak when it comes to remembering these things after a decade of business purchasing and I did my fair share of taking advantage of the consumer.

I frankly enjoy fighting stores on pricing and get dopamine from a good deal and it pains me to pay more than necessary even if I can afford it just fine. I understand not everyone is like this.

There was a period a year or two ago where if you leaked cookies and ad tracking to Amazon and deliberately clicked through to competing sites their algorithm would aggressively slash pricing far below MSRP. I admit I would use this technique in microcenter to get Amazon to give me ludicrously cheap pricing then turn around and make them price match for instant gratification.

Retail/amazon operate at a much higher margin than most people realize.

[lotsofpulp]

>Retail/amazon operate at a much higher margin than most people realize.

Then why don’t their 10-Ks and 10-Qs show it? There is a reason it has a reputation of being a cutthroat business. Out of all the big retail businesses, only Home Depot/Lowes has 8%+ profit margins, and Apple obviously.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/net-pr...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/BBY/best-buy/net-p...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/COST/costco/net-pr...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/KR/kroger/net-prof...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ACI/albertsons/net...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TGT/target/net-pro...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/JWN/nordstrom/net-...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/M/macys/net-profit...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WBA/walgreens/net-...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/CVS/cvs-health/net...

[erkt]

Because net profit margin is different from gross margin. The products are still marked up way higher than that bottom line number. PMn is the margin after you add in all the over head costs and those really have little to do with whether they are loosing money by selling a product under their target mark up.

Best Buy making a gross $250 on a $1000 priced TV or $50 when discounted to $800 still isn’t loosing any money unless they are at their credit ceiling and cannot replace the good sold. They make zero if A customer standing in their store deciding not to even give them $50 and giving it a to a competitor on their cellphone. Tho is absolutely profit opportunity lost, even if it is small.

[lotsofpulp]

>Retail/amazon operate at a much higher margin than most people realize.

This statement encompasses the whole business, for which the profit margin is the relevant metric, not gross margin. And it is clear that the standard retail business is not one in which you can earn a lot of money. Just because a specific item sells to a customer for more than what it costs to buy just that specific item from the supplier, does not mean the business's margins are high. There are myriad costs that have to be accounted for, such as spoilage, theft, inventory, transportation, labor, returns, etc.

Some things sell for higher margin, some things sell for lower margins, but at the end of the day, the stores clearly operate at very low margins. Hence why so many go out of business all the time, and all the brick and mortar we have left are the biggest ones with the largest volumes.

[erkt]

Consider the case of a business operating at excessive margins with huge room to discount but doesn’t. Their fixed costs must then be spread over few transactions and lower their net margins to almost nothing. Instead a business operating at a much more socially optimum price point sells a huge amount of goods at a lower mark up and gets to spread those fixed costs over a lot more transactions. Their Gross markup may be less than the high priced store but their net margin can be higher.

I set a lot of prices during the pandemic. Any average business found that they were granted some degree of monopoly power and could generate higher net margins with less competitive prices. Many of us found the simplest solution was to just pass on all costs to the consumer because they had no choice but to take our price or not get their good.

Times are different and there is competition but many businesses have still forgotten how to increase gross margin by having a sale.

Not to get into politics but tariffs are the same way. The elasticity of demand for a good determines the monopoly power of the supplier/retailer and how much of the tariff gets passed on to the consumer. Highly interchangeable products will not see the full tariff passed on to the consumer because that would mean forgoing all sales. The importer will determine how much gross margin they can give up without loosing money…but the producer in the foreign country also does the same math. Do they completely give up the American market to save inventory for other markets or do they eat some top line profit and still make some sales.

Many goods will indeed be pulled from the market, but if the producer fails to find replacement customers in other markets they will look back at 300M Americans and reconsider whether they can give their importer a better price while still making something. If the good expires, like say a case of white wine, or becomes obsolete in the case of say a lightning charging cable there is additional pressure to make the decision before the surplus simply becomes unseeable.

If a good has no viable alternatives and is relatively shelf stable expect all tariffs to be passed along because the products price is already disconnected from its cost and the business producing it is closer to a monopoly than not.

[neepi]

Amazon pricing isn't always that good and they lie about the discounts and retail prices, at least here in the UK. My US colleagues tell me the same is true in the US. I've actually found that general high street crap seller Argos here tends to have better retail prices than Amazon. I can just amble on down the road and get what I needed same day pick up in person rather than wait for a delivery to turn up.

[kadoban]

If every person price matched every item, they'd be screwed, but: most people don't, many items just can't be, and if eg you're price matching a $20 cpu cooler, you may also be buying a $500 cpu or a bunch of other components that they'll actually make money on.

[roughly]

This is also why different stores have different skus for items - that $20 coolermaster 40mm with red LEDs is cm40rl-w at Walmart and cm40rl-a at Amazon.

[erkt]

Retailers will absolutely budge on this technicality, this is to disarm those that aren’t aggressive. Everyone’s retail margins are wayyyyyy higher than they want the consumer to believe and their holding costs are non-negligible.

[ryao]

I thought the purpose of that was to let them avoid price matching on certain items despite having price matching policies. I have never heard of one budging on this. Have any?

[erkt]

It is so the manager has a policy to fall back on to say no. It is just the second round of negotiation.

I am not saying everyone will play ball, but managers whose pay is a function of sales likely will. Have you ever negotiated buying a car before? Indicating you will let corporate know they lost a sale by not budging on price will almost always win the negotiation with managers who think they can just be lazy without consequence.

In the standard retail environment, I have definitely had businesses price match products with the same specs but very slight SKU differences, you just have to be open about a willingness to forego the instant gratification because that is the only service in person retail provides today. That might mean actually completing the sale online and then asking again. They know when there is actually a material difference to the products.

Businesses that are legit monopolies will not budge.

[fuzzfactor]

It's also so you can't buy the "same" item a year or more later after yours is out of warranty.

Which some people were known to do, and then return their old unit in the new box for a refund.

So model numbers are sometimes changed far more freqently than device characteristics or features are changed.

[fzzzy]

They hope you'll buy a soda and a magazine or whatever. They always try to upsell protection plans.

[seattle_spring]

It's not too uncommon for retail stores to match Amazon, as long as it's specifically both "sold by Amazon" and "shipped by Amazon". Best Buy does too, for example.

[walterbell]

Best Buy will price match competitor websites and printed ads, via online chat, for online delivery or in-store pickup.

[xhkkffbf]

Delivery costs can be significant, especially for big things.

[Spooky23]

Not anymore. That massive logistics network and in house courier ain’t cheap.