Seen in Best Buy this weekend

[David Hayden]

I was in the Best Buy in Lawrence NJ this weekend and they had a 12C and 50g on the shelves. Yay!

Dave

[Sylvain Cote]

Great!

HP in stores in Montreal, QC, Canada ...

Best Buy - nothing
Future Shop - nothing
Staples - 10BII+ only
Coopoly - 10BII/12C/17BII/35S/50G
-> university store
-> the price just make no sense
-> ex: HP-50G @ 230$ CDN, HP-35S @ 130$ CDN

... but not that great here

Sylvain

[Steve Simpkin]

(05-20-2014 04:19 AM)Sylvain Cote Wrote:  -> university store
-> the price just make no sense
-> ex: HP-50G @ 230$ CDN

Wow! That is high! I realize there can be quite a markup at a university book store but that is outrageous.

The U.S. Amazon price on the HP 50G is $70 USD (before State sales tax) which is equivalent to $76 CDN.

The Amazon.CA price on the HP 50G is $110 CDN. I don't know if that includes tax but it is certainly higher than the currency conversion alone.

Why the price premium?

[Sylvain Cote]

Those prices are SRP of HP Canada, which is normally two times the HP USA SRP.
HP Canada never sold it's calculator directly in Canada, you can only buy their calculator from an Canadian authorized reseller (like Coopoly).
Now for some reasons, the American online stores seems to be able to sell USA bought calculators in their Canadian online stores with a little more profit for them.
At the same time HP Canada seems to be closing their eyes on this.
It's better for me, but I wonder what are the Canadian authorized resellers are saying thought.

[bhtooefr]

For what it's worth, the nearest Staples (in Heath, OH) has a 12C display unit, even. (Although, last I checked, I want to say it was a Nut-based one, not an ARM-based one, and the batteries were dead. Their TI-83+ display unit is also a regular TI-83, and their TI-84+ display unit is badly yellowed, so...)

As far as what you can actually buy, I think they have a couple different business HPs on the shelf.

[cutterjohn]

(05-20-2014 03:46 AM)David Hayden Wrote:  I was the Best Buy in Lawrence NJ this weekend and they had a 12C and 50g on the shelves. Yay!

Dave

Yep. Saw one last fall, but it was ridiculously priced, c. $150 IIRC. Amazon was c. $85-90 at the time IIRC...

[Mike Morrow]

(05-20-2014 05:36 AM)Steve Simpkin Wrote:  Wow! That is high! I realize there can be quite a markup at a university book store but that is outrageous.

Those high prices in many college bookstores reduce sales, which paid off for me. In 1995 I missed hearing about the discontinuance of the HP 42S, so I started looking for one immediately. There were none to be found anywhere.

Two years later (in 1997) I walked into the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH) bookstore and found two NIB HP 42S units in stock for $114 each. They had been there apparently since 1993. Even though the batteries were long dead, I bought both and today I consider it the best calculator deal I've ever come across (except maybe for the red-dot HP-35 I got in trade for a TI-58 in 1978, but I didn't know the value of that at the time).

One wonders about the sales philosophy found at many college bookstores...in this case, keeping unsold stock from 1993 that had been discontinued in 1995 on the sales shelf in 1997, still at the original posted price for all those years. It paid off for me, though.

The HP 42S became very desirable (and unobtainable) as soon as its discontinuance was announced. It still surprises me that there were no knowledgeable HP calculator fans at UAH (an engineering/science-oriented school) to recognize the prize that was available at the bookstore.