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| Inexplicable Flash Drive Pricing at Best Buy |
Submitted by:
Tip Hero 08/30/2008 11:56 AM
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 During a recent trip to Best Buy in search of USB flash drives, we discovered some funny things going on with their pricing. We compared prices for a few different size drives and a few different brands. What we found made us wonder if we were missing something.
The three brands we compared were SanDisk, PNY, and Geek Squad (Best Buy’s own brand). We looked at USB flash drive sizes ranging from 2GB to 8GB. Here’s what we found:
San Disk 8 GB: $34.99
PNY 8 GB: $80.99
That’s a huge difference in price for essentially the same thing. In fact, we aren't sure what the differences are other than brand name, and the Best Buy customer service rep (he was quite knowledgeable, having worked there for two years and seemingly very interested in computers and computer accessories) said that he is unaware of any differences between the two. He said that the prices seem to flip-flop just about every week, where one week SanDisk might be offering a low, sale-like price (like they were doing when we were there) and PNY would offer the same drive for the much higher, “normal” price, and then the next week it's PNY’s turn to offer the low, discount-like price and SanDisk the higher, “normal” price. The Geek Squad price was close to the PNY price when we were there, and the Best Buy customer service rep said that Geek Squad pricing is pretty consistent.
We also noticed strange pricing within one brand’s various USB flash drive sizes:
San Disk 2 GB: $27.99
San Disk 4 GB: $19.99
San Disk 8 GB: $34.99
We really thought we were missing something when we looked at these prices, but after speaking with the Best Buy rep, he confirmed that the prices were accurate and that this type of thing happens quite often. Why would anyone buy the 2GB SanDisk USB flash drive based on this pricing? You get 2GB more for $8 less when you buy the 4GB flash drive. And, at the other end, you can pay just $7 more for 6GB more if you buy the 8GB drive – costing just over $1 per GB for the extra 6GB.
We have no good explanation for why the pricing is like this, but the Best Buy rep told us that strange pricing like this is fairly common. He also informed us that the 4GB drive sometimes drops to as low as $14.99, and he’s seen the 2GB drive as low as $9.99.
So once again, it just goes to show how important it is to pay close attention to unit prices – in this case, per GB prices. And it also goes to show the importance of shopping around and comparison shopping, given how wacky these prices are and that this probably happens quite a bit in different retailers all across the country (a quick search online turned up even lower prices for some of these drive sizes, though with different brands).
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