Misc. Ramblings

A barrier to more people in Hawaii shopping on-line is the problem of shipping. Up until a year or two ago, UPS provided Ground Shipping rates. However, they decided to stop such service and provide only one or two-day service. As you might guess, the cost of next day or second day air delivery is substantial. By substantial I mean more than $20 for even the lightest shipment.

So when I find a website like Amazon that provides reasonable shipping costs, I will order things from them. On the other hand, I recently tried to buy something from New Egg. When I went to the checkout page, I was surprised to see an option of UPS ground for shipping to Hawaii. I was over joyed! Ground shipping to Hawaii was back! So I picked that option and finished checking out. But a day later, much to my dismay, I got an email from New Egg saying they didn't really have UPS ground shipping and that I had to pay for first or second day air (which was almost double the cost of ground).

Now, I am not a lawyer but it seems to me New Egg made an offer to sell me an item at a certain price and then offered various shipping options. I accepted that offer and submitted payment in the form of a credit card. In a court of law, that is one definition of a contract. Break that contract, and I can sue. Although I don't actually plan to do so because it's just not worth my time and money, a class action suit might be workable.

In any case, one must wonder why the people who put the New Egg site together didn't program the shipping so that delivery addresses in states they don't serve are locked out. For example, Sears.com does that by making sure you can't enter the state of Hawaii in the address field. While I deplore Sears for ignoring my state, and Sears obviously by making such a decision will get zero business from 1.5 million potential customers, at least they are up front about it. New Egg, on the other hand, appears, in my opinion, to be pulling a bait and switch.

So, I will be ordering my Antec Aria case, AMD 64 3200+ CPU, ASUS A8N-VM CSM motherboard, Seagate SATA NCQ 160GB hard drive, and other assorted bits and pieces from someone else (I'm putting together a Windows Media Center PC. Yes, I know, it's Windows. But the Linux equivalents aren't. Equivalent, that is. You have to do too much compiling and hand tuning to get these things to work, if you can get them to work at all and hardware support, especially for HD, is rather sparse.).

Aloha!