Telephones Sometimes Give Better Deals Than The 'Net

I decided to make the plunge the other day, and buy a large external hard drive for my 'puter. I already have an 80-gig internal drive on my Dell, and a 200-gig external USB Maxtor drive, but the internal is filled with large photographs, and the 200-gig is the back-up. I want to clear the 80-gig internal of almost all photos, and use the 200-gig as the main photo repository. After looking at many of these drives, and realizing that whatever I buy will eventually fill up with my work, I wanted to get a drive from 500-gigs to 1-terabyte. Now, prices for these things vary. 1-tb drives are no less than around $700.00 and I have seen some over $1K. That's a lot of scratch. One-half a terabyte (500-gigs) prices are dropping, and I decided to go that route. Currently, I could buy two half-tb drives for much less than a 1-tb drive. I researched the price and found Office Depot would sell one: A 500-gb, 7200 rpm, USB 2.0, external Western Digital hard drive for $279.00.

My wife had an "anniversary card" from Dell that ballyhooed their "copper anniversary," and offered a 15-percent discount with a coupon number input to their website. I didn't think of Dell, because I thought they'd be too expensive. I looked up their drives, and to my surprise, they were selling almost exactly the same drive for $10.00 less than Office Depot. If worse came to worse, I could use that price to get the same pricing from Office Depot. Then the 15% came back into focus. I would have to pay shipping and tax with Dell, but the 15% would mean a savings of over $35.00! I put one in my Dell online shopping cart to see what the shipping would be. I had to put in the coupon number to get the discount. It refused my coupon number. I tried again. Same result. There was a phone number on the card. I called and got a great salesman on the line. He was able to bring up the coupon and the drive in my shopping cart. He tried the coupon number, and same result. The salesman then asked me to wait while he checked with his supervisor. He came back and said, "Success." I asked how much the drive was going to cost. He said $229.49. I asked about the shipping. He said Free! The total with tax was $248.77. I figured I saved over $50.00 on the drive, after taxes were added. I asked how his supervisor was able to get the 15%. He stated that he couldn't do it either, but they wanted to make a sale and make me a happy Dell customer, so they discounted it anyway. The website would never have done this. Moral: If there is a phone number, call it. You may get a better deal than dealing with a computer.