P_A_N_I_C said:
had to buy a 10m cat 5 cable quickly today from a large well known pc shop : £19.99
OcUK price : £5.82
insane :/
Yeah, but if this is referring to the company I assume it is, they and OcUK have rather different cost structures, don't they?
What you get with a company like OcUK is a mail-order outfit that is stripped down to the minimum necessary to provide the required service in a mail-order environment. That is nothing like the high-street retail environment. For a start, OcUK don't have to pay the rates for prime city centre or retail park locations, either in rent or property purchasing, and nor do they have to pay for the operating costs, like staff, heat, light, fancy store decor, expensive till systems and, of course, stock holding in dozens of stores (so JIT stock systems aren't anything like as effective).
The whole point of mail order is to keep costs down. The whole point of high-street retail is that you can browse the goods, pick up what you want and take it away with you. i.e. it's about customer convenience, not just price.
There've been many occasions when I've needed something like a cable and I need it RIGHT NOW, not in 48 hours time. Moreover, I don't want to have to wait around for hours, maybe all day, depending on the whim of the courier company and traffic conditions.
Are high street stores more expensive than a mail order outfit? Of course they are. But that's because they have a different, and much higher, cost structure, and because they are selling to a different need. And, of course, prices have to reflect cost structure.
While there presumably are people that buy from a certain large high-street chain because they don't know prices are high, don't assume that everybody that pays those prices does so because they don't know any better. I pay what I need to pay because I'm not prepared to be jerked about by couriers. If that means a cable costs me £20 rather than £6 (plus carriage), so be it. Time, after all, is money and I value mine.
