Biggest holiday rip offs?

[airshifter]

While I'm sure many of these will apply to year round sales, I've noticed certain things that companies really push hard during the holidays which often amount to pure highway robbery. I thought maybe people would like to chime in on what and where they are robbing the people that don't bother to check it out.

A couple of my examples:


Any type of electronics related cable. At several places I've been to while Christmas shopping, they have much larger than normal displays of HDMI, component, and just about anything else cables. Of course with holiday electronics sales people need them, but the prices are insane! I've seen HDMI cables retailing for $50 plus that I can buy at another retailer for $5. Wholesale on a lot of those things has to be almost nothing at all.


Warranties/protection plans - I picked up an Ipod Shuffle for my wife, along with some earbuds that were better than the included crap. A cashier at Best Buy tried over and over to sell me the extended warranty/protection crap, to the point that I finally told him either finish the transaction or I'd move to another register.

The protection plan was actually fairly cheap in both cases. In the case of the earbuds I pointed out to him that they have a 100% lifetime replacement warranty, and they will even give 50% credit to a person admitting abuse destroyed them. He just didn't seem to grasp that I didn't want to pay for something included in the sale price.


We've all seen the real good deals and such, but where are you seeing the high mark up items?

[Dave B]

All of the above are year round things, really. Extended warranties are almost never worth the price unless they include accidental damage cover for portable items such as mobile phones or MP3 players; even then your house insurance may well cover it.

HDMI cable prices are a bugbear of mine: it's a digital signal, admittedly a high speed one, so as long as it arrives intact there's no physical way one cable can offer better picture or sound quality than another. You've never seen a printer manufacturer claiming that a £100 USB cable will make your printouts better, have you?

That said, I do have several grand's worth of air filtration equipment so that the air quality in my house is at operating theatre levels of cleanliness - it helps my wi-fi :p

What I have noticed at Christmas are crappy "gift packs" where you pay an inflated price for something just because it comes in a nice box (which you'll throw away) or with a carry case (which you'll never use).

Case in point, two 330ml bottles of Peroni with one glass retailing for £8 in a large supermarket, [looks round to check Susy isn't reading this] so I bought the missus a pack of three 660ml bottles for a fiver and we'll pinch a glass next time we're in the pub :p

Sad though it sounds, we're doing some of our shopping after Christmas: we both agreed there's no point buying stuff now which we won't use until January anyway when we know full well it'll be at least 50% off after the 25th.

[Mark]

Holidays are during the summer. This is Christmas.

[Dave B]

Holidays are during the summer. This is Christmas.
Fair point, and one which reminds me of just one of the myriad reasons why I hate that Coke advert :p

[Tazio]

Holidays are during the summer. This is Christmas.

Attributing supernatural power to a man that may have been humanities first significant non-violent revolutionary-- Mr Alcatraz