Absolutely random Amazon.com discounts

Saturday 21 January 2006 - Filed under Internet

Living in the northeast means dry weather all winter long. That leads to dry nostrils and very uncomfortable living. To help out, I’ve been trying to get a humidifier from Best Buy for about two weeks, but they are constantly out of stock due to the aforementioned super dry-ass weather. Why BB only? I have a Christmas gift card, and I’m cheap. Well, I finally just caved in due to dry nose pressure and headed to Amazon.com to buy something.

Picked out the Honeywell HWM450 Quick Steam Warm Moisture Humidifier for myself at $54.99 and proceeded to checkout. Get there, choose cheap-guy shipping, and voila — final cart price, $38.96. Somewhere, promotional certificate for -$16.03 showed up. That’s a 29.2% discount for no good reason. Weird.

I’m the inquisitive type, so let’s try an experiment. Put the $159.99 Braun 8595 Activator Self-Cleaning Shaving System with LCD Display in my cart and check out. Five clicks later (maybe I should turn on the ‘ol One-Click(tm) function), and I’m greeted with Order Total: $118.39. Weird. That’s -$41.60 just for being me. Now 26%.

Let’s go for broke. Grabbed the $899.99 Garmin Nuvi 350 Pocket or Vehicle GPS Navigator with Integrated MP3 Player and Photo Viewer. $72.64 (8%) off. Cheapskates.

Amazon.com is known for books. Let’s try that. Slide that copy of The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography : A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography in my cart for $29.95 and -$8.24 shows up, for savings of 27.5%.

I’m interested in a new cell phone. Let’s look for an unlocked GSM one. The Nokia 8801 for $644.99 looks nice. What? Only $72.64 (11%) off? Now that number looks familiar. Adding more products to my cart gives me the same $72.64. Looks like I’m capped. Guess I can take that unlocked Treo 650 out of there.

I’m stumped.

2006-01-21  »  mark