Wait, What Just Happened?

I'm a little confused. Yesterday I saw a good deal on a 1 TB hard drive in the newspaper ad from Fry's Electronics. I've been keeping an eye out for deals on hard drives. 300 hours of recorded television on my MythTV box just isn't cutting it. I suppose I could just get around to watching the last 4 seasons of 24... Someday. But taking thousands of 10 mega-pixel pictures in a month is also creating a need for more disk space.

So, I went to Fry's and of course they were out of the drive in their ad. That part made sense to me. I've never gone to Fry's to buy something in their ad and actually fond it. Come to think of it, I never really buy anything at Fry's anymore. I go there, spend a few hours looking at everything, and then go home and start ordering stuff online. The last time I can remember buying something substantial at Fry's was around 1998, back when the Interwebs were just getting established and I had to listen to 30 seconds of strange beeps and squeals coming from my modem every time I connected. All for a glorious 7kB/s! Shudder.

But yesterday, I went to Fry's, asked a sales associate for help, and actually received it. He told me they had sold out of their special, but had another drive, a better drive, for only $10 more (still a reasonable price). We went to the shelf and didn't find any (also not surprising). He said "I'll go check the back" and emerged a minute later with a drive marked $20 more than he had just quoted me. He went to the register and printed a form for me that reduced the price on that drive to what he had quoted me. What?!?!

I was very confused. I asked someone at Fry's for hep and less than 5 minutes later I was holding (almost) what I asked for. And I actually bought it. And it was a good deal. And it wasn't broken when I took it out of the box.

In the days of reliable online vendors like NewEgg and bargain basement vendors like Meritline, ComputerGeeks and DealExtreme coupled with a plethora of deal-sleuthing websites, I was beginning to think that the days of brick and mortar stores like Fry's were numbered. And they probably are. But perhaps they will be around slightly longer than I thought.