I seem to write quite a few rants don’t I? Oh well, at least this is a safer way to vent my frustrations to the world. So I needed/wanted to get a new flash drive, partly after last night’s software swapping, and because all of mine, my teeny 1Gb, my trusty 2Gb and my old laptop drive that I stuck in an external USB enclosure were all ok for the most part, but were becoming more and more unreliable.

So I started searching, after learning the CompUSA had been purchased by TigerDirect, one of my favorite online stores, I looked to see if they had something both spacious, and reasonable in price. I knew that I had just missed the opportunity to get a 16Gb thumb drive through techbargains.com at a very nice price, but I was hoping I could find something close. I checked Microcenter, not my first choice, but they did have their own brand of thumb drives, clear up to 16Gb that only ran $59.99. Not a bad deal. But I knew the speed most likely wouldn’t be there.

Techbargains has another 16 gigger through newegg for $69.99 after rebate, but I didn’t want to have to wait. So I looked at CompUSA… Sure enough, they had a 16Gb high-speed thumb drive for $79.99. Damn, compulsion, desire and need all took over. I went to the bank, deposited my earnings from Wednesday night, and then went and spent most of it.

The fact that I walked into the store, was greeted by at least 3 people, and then was left to wander the store until I happened to stumble upon their highly guarded counter with a locked case of high capacity thumb drives sitting behind it. Then, after standing there for 5, maybe even 10 minutes (it took me 30 seconds to find what I looking for in the case) I went to find someone to open the case so I could hand them my money and pay for the hard work they did in trying to sell it to me.

It’s no wonder than big box stores make peoples skin crawl when they have to go to them. Unless you know what you’re going for and know exactly what you’re doing, finding someone who does know what you need is like trying to find a 6 leafed clover! This is exactly why online shopping does so well, since no one has any people skills, let alone the desire to talk and sell something, the consumer doesn’t have to deal with people who already don’t want to deal with them! Ok, I’m done now, I swear. For today at least…

But in hindsight, I can finally pack all the tools I wanted on it, and not have to worry about running out of space past that! When the 32Gb drives drop in price, guess what I’m getting?!?