This is random a post about my most recent relapse with this addiction that I think some here struggle with.
I have a minor OCD personality quirk and I need to do some pretty heavy product research before making any big purchases. You know the usual: reading as many reviews as you can find, joining and searching multiple forums, down loading user’s manuals, making excel sheets to compare features that are important to me, and seeing how those features relate to the cost of the various candidates. And last but not least, I’m a sucker for anything I perceive to be a real deal.
During the last holiday season I was in heavy research mode for a new plasma. I’m kind of a Panny fanboy, but there were some upper level Samsungs in the running while I was making my list and checking it twice. Then finally the stars aligned. There was a 3 year financing offer and a 50” 800 series panny plasma on sale. I don’t recall the price now, but it was just on the edge of making me feel uncomfortable about the purchase, so I waited a day or two, rationalizing it in my head, until I convinced myself it was too good of a deal to pass up, and wouldn’t you know the sale was gone. I felt disappointed and relived all at the same time. Nothing else I was looking at really compared to the deal that I had just let slip away, so I quit looking and took a little pride in fiscal my responsibility.
Now fast forward to Tuesday of this week. One of my colleagues asked me to come down to his office to give him some basic advice about current TV technology. During our discussion he mentions that Best Buy was offering 3 years no interest…and the gears started rolling. I walked straight down to my office, and started looking. Holy crap, a 58” 800 series Panasonic on sale for 2 grand, for me it was a no brainer. 30 minutes later I was in my girlfriend’s office telling her she needed to talk me down from this purchase. Well, once this discussion uncovered the facts that we’d (she’d) need to pick out a new tv stand, and the 42” we currently have could go into the master bed room, she end up not being the strong voice of reason that I was looking for. I took a day to think things over and decided on Wednesday I was going to pull the trigger. I checked the BB website for available delivery dates to my zip and it tells me there are no delivery dates…, I check the zip that our local store is located in and again no delivery dates…I check the zip that I work in and low and behold a list of dates gets kicked back to me. I decided that this mystery was going to need some face time with someone in the store to solve. So the GF and I go to BB to see if there are any tv stands that are worth looking at and so that I could ask questions about the shipping issue. We find a stand with no tags on it and while the BB employee is trying to find info on the stand to look it up for us, I popped my question about the shipping anomaly on the website.
Long story short, I was SOL. But this time I had come too far, I was standing in the middle of the store with all these temptations surrounding me. Now I start looking around and I know I’m nowhere near as educated on the new models to feel comfortable with what I’m about to do. Then the BB employee says he can take 100 of their current price for the 54” Panasonic S1 series and it took me all of about 45sec to say ok. Since Panny changed their model nomenclature all I knew is that it was not the bottom of the line, but pretty sure it wasn’t equivalent to the 800 series I had intended to purchase, which I now know is the G10 series. Of course, I went straight home to see what kind of damage my impulse reaction had just done, and while it might not be the perfect set, and it wasn’t the deal of the century, I think I’ll be able to live with my decision.
Anyone else relate to this psychosis?
