Gift cards have quickly become the gift of choice for most
…and Target and Best Buy are really trying to play them up even more!
So, a lot of people have turned to gift cards as an “easy out” for getting a gift. Me personally? I love to get them, but that is probably because I’m the odd man that is a shopaholic. It seems that some of our big retailers are trying to remove one of the stigmas associated with giving gift cards…you aren’t giving something physical to the person, so it feels less like a gift. Therefore, let me introduce the proposed solution starting with Best Buy first.
The speaker gift card from Best Buy includes a speaker and a mini headphone jack so that you can plug it in to almost any MP3 player you may own. I guess if you don’t have an MP3 player, you can just use the gift card to purchase a new iPod (even though rumors are that they will stop making them soon) and then plug it in.
Now, the cooler of the two that I will be talking about is the Target Camera gift card. Now this one comes completely loaded…40 free prints, a self timer and averages over 50 pictures with the built in 8MB of space. I’m sure it isn’t the highest quality, but a nice free benefit for a gift card if you ask me. I’ll take either!
Product Info -Best Buy Speaker Gift Card-
Product Info -Target Camera Gift Card-
Retrieved from -Coolest Gadgets- and -Coolest Gadgets-
Between ignorance and selfish needs…
…the rest of us will end up paying for people who return items to electronics stores.
What made me think of this was an article in PC World that listed out by percentages what returns of electronics actually are. Here is the breakdown:
68 percent of returns are products that work properly but do not meet customers’ expectations for some reason.
27 percent of returns are buyer’s remorse…situations where customers simply changed their minds.
That leaves only 5% due only to malfunction.
So, now huge electronics stores such as Best Buy and Circuit City for example, have a policy which can charge up to 15% of the value of the product as a restocking fee. So, the people who would purchase a GPS for a trip and then return in when they get back since they won’t use it anymore are causing the rest of us to pay for their selfishness. As much as those company are money grubbers, I can’t fault them for that policy due to the amount of money they lose since they can’t sell the item as “new” anymore and have to reduce the price.
So, moral of the story, do your research prior to purchase and try and find a floor model somewhere so that you can try it out. Simple as that.
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