Today I was trying to buy a new mouse. My old one had started acting funny (I'd take my hand off it, and the cursor would keep creeping along my screen, even after cleaning the mouse), and that had bugged me enough that I sorta threw it across the room, and now it doesn't work at all. The round hockey puck that came with my B&W G3 is unacceptably small, and has no orientation clues, so I just needed a new mouse.
I went to the CNET Intellimouse Explorer page (CNet's great for comparison shopping), and started clicking around. Here's my (forced) two-hour survey of the online retailers I tried.
- ECost - They don't even mention their shipping costs until you've had to enter your credit card number. How incredibly gunky.
- Amazon - Usually a good shopping experience, but they were out of stock on The Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer. Pfui.
- MacMall - They listed 55 in stock on their website. Calling on the phone produced an estimate of negative 100 in stock, and a two-week delay.
- buy.com - The ad on the page (for something totally unrelated) loaded, and then the rest of the page stalled. Five minutes later, I just punted the window.
- Microsoft - I'm using Netscape. First time around, there was an error loading the page. No customer service number anywhere handy. No availability check once I got the page to load. Finally found the number and gave 'em a call to find that they're back-ordered until late February.
- egghead.com - They won't let you order (or check the shipping price) without setting up an account. The page to set up the account needs your credit-card number, and it's not a secure page. Bzzt.
- outpost.com - out of stock and no sign of that on the web-page. Sheesh.
Sad to say, I finally just drove to the nearest CompUSA (aka CompUseless), found the hardware manager (since none were on the shelves), and he grabbed me one of the hundreds they had in the warehouse. Problem solved.