I purchased a new laptop online on March 1st. Today, May 9th, I decided to purchase a duplicate for my wife. When I went to the company web site and clicked on “reorder”, I received the following message:
Up 28% in 69 days.
For what it’s worth, I see it cheaper than $1200 at HP’s site and at Best Buy.
Is that inflation or just part of the chip shortage?
For the record, the following Best Buy laptop is the same model except with an Intel SSD and Optane. The vast majority of users would never tell the difference between that and the NVMe drive.
Or it might be that they can get away with it. People complain, blame inflation and profit!
That is the base model with at 512 Gb SSD. The laptop I had ordered had a $100 upgrade to a 1TB SSD drive. With that, the Best Buy price is $22 less than buying direct from HP. FWIW: this computer was $992 last week so it jumped $210 over the weekend.
Those are not mutually exclusive. Inflation can be triggered by shortages.
Ah. I was just bringing it up because it confused me why I would look for one model and Best Buy would show another. I wanted to save you having to check all the specs like I did.
I’m sorry it didn’t help you out much.
In my experience, it’s not at all unusual for prices of things sold online to fluctuate (up or down) over time. Maybe it’s supply issues; maybe it’s marketing or data-gathering (“Now let’s see what it does to sales levels if we bump up the price by $100 for a month, and then bring it back down”).
I don’t know of any overall inflation right now for PCs; in fact prices have been going down as GPUs become more available and finding sale prices on CPUs, memory and storage isn’t uncommon. I’m guessing this specific laptop is just fluctuating in price for somewhat independent reasons.
One of those ancient Greek fellas said, “The price of a thing shall be what the market will bear”.
If they can get ten guys to pay an extra $200 instead of eleven guys to pay the old price, they will go for it.
In regard to that, does anyone recall if prices went up when a hard drive factory burned 15 years ago? I still find an elderly desktop with a laptop drive in it now and then.
OP here. Just to see if there was a further price increase, I checked the price today. The price has now reverted back to $942 (what I paid in March for the options I wanted) from $1202 (the price on May 9th). I wonder why there was a 28% price jump that lasted less than two weeks.
Unfortunately for HP, I made an alternate purchase during those two weeks.