After putting it off for a couple of months, I finally decided to pull the trigger on a Canon i9900 printer. It received and excellent review from an excellent web page, imaging-resources.com, and I was hooked. Two things kept me from making the purchase sooner. One was that I am always hesitant to part with $500. The second is that when I went to Fry’s Electronics I saw an HP with nearly the same specifications and the same price sitting right next to it. It was an HP8750. I went back to the imaging-recource.com website to try and find a review. They had not reviewed that product as of yet. I waited a little while to see if they would. No luck. Eventually I searched other websites for reviews. I found an informative review on PC Mag’s????? website. (I don’t remember exactly where. All I really remember is that they liked the Canon a little better than the HP.) So now I had my mind made up and it was just a matter of going over to Fry’s and picking it up. I checked the newspaper ads on the weekend hoping to see it on sale but no such luck. After work on Monday I went up to Fry’s on Brokaw and went straight to where the printer was on display and still being sold for $499. A sales person came up to me and I asked if it was available. He came back a few minutes later and told me that it was not in stock. I asked how long it would be before they would get one in and he said maybe a few days. Then he added that the Campbell store had 10 units if I wanted it right away. I almost went to that store to begin with as I live and work about equidistant from both stores so I thought “what the heck” and headed down there. The traffic jam on 880 was annoying but it could have been worse. As I pulled into the Campbell store’s parking lot I was reminded of why I do not prefer going to that store. There’s not enough parking. I was fortunate however and someone had just pulled out of a spot near the exit and I parked right away. In the store, I grabbed a cart and wheeled it back to the printers. I parked next to the Canon while a salesperson helped another couple. When he was done with that transaction another sales associate conferred with him on some other issue. To my surprise neither seemed eager to help me. In a store where the salespeople almost outnumber the customers I couldn’t believe I was having to wait around to be helped. Thankfully as the other sales associate was walking away he stopped and asked if I needed help. He understood immediately what I was after and grabbed my cart and headed off to go get me one. I felt good about it. He stopped what he was doing to go get me my printer. After quite a few minutes he finally returned empty handed. He said the system shows there were 3 in the store but he couldn’t find them. He asked the department manager where they might be and was told they were out of stock. The only one in the store was the display. The sales associate asked the manager why they were listed in the system and he just said flatly that it was a mistake. The sales associate wanted to direct me to go to the San Jose store and I informed him that I had just been there and they told me you guys had 10! To this the manager said the system always showed that. I stood there for a moment waiting for him to offer me some sort of option, but this arrogant bastard did not feel like being communicative. I asked him when they might expect to have the printer in stock and he said he didn’t know. Furthermore, because the system showed they had printers in stock, he said headquarters was not likely to ship more. Then he tried talking me into an Epson printer - offering to sweeten the deal with a discount. I told him “no thank you” and turned and walked out of the store.

As I left I felt relieved to not have made my purchase at Fry’s. I’ve never liked that store for all of the reasons I just illustrated above and I was glad they would not be getting any of my money. I celebrated with a burrito from Baja Fresh. The next morning when I got to work I logged onto newegg.com (from where I had just recently purchased a 19″ Hyundai flat panel monitor) and searched for my printer. There it was. Sales price $411. With the $15 shipping and tax, the grand total was $455. Should have gone there to begin with.

The moral of this story is that I will never make a big purchase from Fry’s. The chance of saving a few bucks is not worth going to that zoo. In the summer I will probably sell back vacation time and put that money towards a big LCD television. Some place other than Fry’s will be getting my money.