The rural Best Buys kind of are terrible. “Middle America” and “Empty Nester” targeted locations really don’t give you anything other than medicore middle-of-the-line product selections. What I’d kill for one of the “Urban Trendsetter” format locations…
Yes absolutely. My local Best Buy is a depressing hollow shell. The drone section is vacant, the PC part area is now vacant (no GPUs, no RAM, no SSDs). I have visited glorious Microcenter in Dallas, which is a long way from here, and a magnitude different (better) experience.
Lol that's almost literally the cheapest possible option. You can get these for $3-4 (on a board and with a mipi cable and everything) from China - I have a dozen in a box that I bought to test out a camera array idea before shelling out for nicer sensors.
The best part is seeing someone tear a Flock camera apart, see the camera, and immediately go slap it on their 3D printer and hook it into their Pi and just have it work out of the box ;)
Weirdly for me: IKEA. I’m within ~240 miles of an IKEA in Canada and an IKEA in the US.
While they’ve started to inflate some items to meet currency conversion rates, some items are still cheaper for me to purchase in Canada directly and bring back to the US.
For instance, even at small scale: one BILLY bookcase, article number 205.220.46, is $90 CAD (~$65.70 US) at IKEA CA and $79 USD at IKEA US.
YMMV coming back across the border but in my experience I just got waived through the border every time I told them I was “just coming back with some cheap crap from IKEA”.
Travelling to a no sales tax state for large purchases. Sales tax is roughly 10%, state with no sales tax is 150 miles away for me.
Doing the math, 300 miles round trip, 30 miles per gallon, $4/gallon for gas, if I'm buying something that costs more than $400 I get a free trip to other state.
Downside is that you're only breaking even for the time, but if you're making a $1,000+ purchase then it's definitely worth the time for me to make the trip.
It's likely poorly enforced, but it's on the books and it's a complicated one to track. It was more of a concern when internet sales didn't collect state sales.
There's also Simplified Sellers Use Tax lawsuit that was recently in the courts.
Car's 11 cents a mile, that's less than twenty bucks in gas, me spending ~5 to 6 hours total back and forth retrieving it is still worth so much more than waiting days on end for freight shipment (and the hundreds that can cost, combined with the messy scheduling commitment if you buy any large goods -- I just checked, it's $289! for that Billy to be shipped to my doorstep).
I have in fact brought a rolled up full size mattress home in the back seat of a Fusion Hybrid (it fit! with room for other things!) and it was a great cost savings. As a bonus at the time there was an additional sale in IKEA CA on the mattress that US didn't have, so I saved even more.
> and backed out when the tax credits disappeared...
As they should. If the terms of the deal change, you need to start over with the business case and financials.
If you want someone to be mad at, it’s the politicians making these bad tax credit decisions. Not the companies trying to respond to the tax credit incentives. Getting companies to build things they otherwise wouldn’t is the entire purpose of tax credits.
There's only... well, 51 of them. If you're lucky, you're near one of the 42 that are actually online and available for fueling (as of this comment).
Stations running out of fuel and stations going offline for hardware failures runs rampant.
Oh, and some stations might not be able to provide the highest pressure H2, so you might be stuck taking an 85% tank fill... and at nearly $30/kg and a 5.6kg (full) tank, that's an expensive fill.
I picked up an Axis security camera rated for ALPR use (the Q1700 series) and it has a safety warning telling me I shouldn't look at the built in IR LEDs for more than a minute...
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