Retail Therapy

Last Friday we discovered we had a gift card that had to be used by the end of the month. Lately we have been stimulating the economy (GPS, Kindle, Camera) and we really don’t NEED anything (not that we needed all of that LOL) so whenever we go to Frys Bill get’s this glazed look when he stops by the HDTV that is generally running the latest Pirates movie. The glazed look is not entirely for the buxom beauties on the screen but is also for the HD detail OF the Buxom beauties. Hehe. We had discussed purchasing a Blu-ray player before but since we do not have an HD TV it didn’t make any sense. We were determined (apparently not determined enough) to wait till our current TV set died before purchasing a new HDTV. Well we decided that it couldn’t hurt to use our gift card as part of the payment for the purchase a Blu-ray player. Since the price difference between blu-ray players and a PS3 are not much difference with the current drop in prices and the PS3 is a multi-tasker we went to Frys on Friday evening and picked on up. Now in the past my first movie in each new type of media has been Little Mermaid. It was my first DVD and it was my first Digital purchase. So I was hoping to grab it but low and behold Disney being the hording bastards they are, Little Mermaid is not currently available. So we pick up the next best thing Cars. We didn’t really know if there would be any difference with our current TV and so we also bought a live human movie just in case (Point of No Return). So we go home (it’s now after 10pm) and hook up the new player. We realize as we are reading that the PS3 does not come with a HDMI cable. So Bill goes online looking at things and discovers that the TV we have will make no difference at all with a HD player. He is very disappointed and I have to admit it did take the “cool” out of having a new toy. Grin So we went to bed that night a little disappointed.

Off topic somewhat: Bill and I listen to a morning radio show each day on the way to work and while we get ready. Several mornings each week there is an ad from a store called Video Only. The basic skit is a woman that has looked up the best TVs and now is ready to buy. She talks about how she is going to go from store to store checking prices. The guy says “Well you should go to Video Only they have the lowest prices.” Then the jingle pops on and says “Go to Video Only or You’ll be sorry.” The ad has begun to have a life of it’s own in our house. After the fourth or fifth week of hearing the same ad I groaned and said to Bill, “Why does this woman need to buy a TV again… didn’t she get one last week?” I went on saying this every time I heard the commercial. Finally Bill decides she must be buying them to family members too. Now we have a running joke going on about who the TV might be for this week. Since it runs nearly every week we have now gone on to obscure friends and very far reaching family. Grin

Back on topic: So Bill having been brain washed by the constant deluge of Video Only commercials decides to pop on their website and take a look at their ad. They say they have the best prices around and so I went through and tried matching TVs listing on their sales flier with TVs on Amazon. Unfortunately they are smart and do not post TV models in their ads so it became fairly difficult to match price points. However, We did match up 2 brands where the prices listed on the ad were less then any of the TVs made for that brand listed online so we determined they probably did have decent prices. Now remember we have a TV that works just fine but is not HD. This has not bothered us even though we have access to HD TV stations with our cable. (Apparently Bill didn’t know this or we might have given in sooner, LOL.) So Saturday we decided to go over and see what they had. Being a cost efficient person that I am but with no time to plan we stopped at the library to read up on what Consumer Reports had to say about HDTVs, while Bill looked at NADA Values on a few motorhomes we had looked at on our trip home from Friday Harbor. Then we set off. While we were on the way to the store Bill decided he had a hankering to go to the movies, this was funny to me since we were going to buy a new TV that we could play movies on but I don’t complain when he wants to go to the movies since I missed so many in past years when people I knew didn’t want to go. So we headed to the theater and caught Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (very fun flick) and then after having lunch (if you aren’t hungry going into this movie you will be when you come out) we headed over to get a TV. When I go shopping for anything over $100 I like to go prepared to deal with sales people. I really dislike pushy sales people. So When we left the house I grabbed a notebook. I had written prices and model numbers from a couple websites so I could actually do some price comparisons if they had the same models. When we had stopped at the library I complied even more information. So I went in with my notebook. For those that do not know, if you want to avoid the idiot sales people that just want to push something bigger and better and really don’t know anything about the product they are selling, take a notebook. It is like Sales person Kryptonite. LOL I walk in there geared up. Now usually when I do this I have spent months researching. When I went in looking for a new bike I had a very good idea of what I wanted. This intidates sales people. Going in to get the TV I was armed with just enough knowledge to make me dangerous. Bill and I had discussed that we did not need something 40 inches or bigger. We have nowhere to hang a TV in the family room because of a massive fireplace and more windows then should be allowed in any one room. The TV stand we have would not accommodate anything much bigger then a 36 inch. The current TV we had was a 27 inch. So we went in looking for a 26 inch or a 32 inch. It is funny to me that TVs used to have a much broader range of sizes. Nowadays you can get the 26, the 32, or the 500 (exaggerating but that’s what it looks like). When you walk into the store the first thing you see are the Massively monstrous TVs that you would have to hang on a wall because they just wouldn’t fit anywhere standing up! We looked right and looked left and finally discovered on the far wall hidden were the reasonably sized TVs. I head in that direction and there is a lovely couple being dogged by a salesman the likes of Ted Danson’s character in Made in America. I made up my mind that if THAT one decided to talk to me I would simply tell him, “I don’t like you, can I speak to someone else?”

Luckily he was tied up trying to convince the couple that they really wanted a 58 inch $4000 TV and not the 42 inches that would cost them a quarter that. Bill and I ignored all of the people that tried to talk to us. Meanwhile we were looking at the different options for the size we wanted. Funny how they don’t put the 720i resolutions anywhere near the 1080i resolutions so you can actually tell the difference. It was also funny to me how certain TVs had much brighter color or dimmer for ones that they might not make as much on. Ahh the fun part of advertising. Of course none of the TVs they had matched the ones I had written on my paper since they discounting models at the same frequency that McDonalds sell McNuggets. So we looked at the brands that had had better ratings and picked out a nice 32 inch that was on deep discount due to the fact that the must have updated a button or added an input and the one we were buying was now discontinued. So we spent $399 and I am fairly pleased. We figured once we sell the house if we have a place for something bigger or different in the future we can look at it then. God knows the new electronics don’t have the life spans that old electronics did. Once we made our choice I sought out the least offensive of the sales people. The nice man must have seen my notebook because he did not try to up-sell us. He simply went in the back grabbed the TV and then made sure we had the least expensive HDMI cords in the place. Ahh what a nice buying experience. We went home and plugged in our new toy to our new toy and stuck Cars in the player. We were very happy with the video quality but I think I notice it more on none animated movies and TV. Cars is just so beautiful to begin with it would be hard to make it even better.

And so we now have a 27 inch Sony non-HD TV that needs a home. Know anyone that would want it? Heh

So much for my determination. Although I think I needed a little retail therapy.