Newegg Caught Acting Sketchy

[MrFancyPants]

I had a friend that worked at Fry's. They had a shrink wrap machine and would shrink wrap returns and put them back on the floor with no indication it was a return.

I saw those products at Frys. At least in my experience they were fairly easy to spot, because the shrink wrap job was usually terrible, so you could tell it wasn't manufacturer sealed. Not excusing them for being shady, but I never got taken by that.

If Newegg really is in a decline of shady practices, as time will surely tell, I hope there's another etailer besides Amazon to fill the niche.

[-hanko]

Newegg is definitely going down the same path. I experienced that when buying a printer last fall.

[Robotron2k84]

What most are unaware of, is that even Amazon, Walmart, Home Depot and NewEgg are all starting to just be front ends for Alibaba and other Chinese e-commerce direct sellers with associated mark-up.

Doesn’t matter who’s selling you the goods, it’s all coming from the same back-end fulfillment. Only difference is if they ship direct from Shanghai or have a warehouse here before it drop ships to Amazon, etc.

I went looking for some 2.5GbE N-BaseT USB adapters (Realtek) to make an ad-hoc 10GbT4 iSCSI/FC SLB connection to a PC that otherwise couldn’t make a faster connection than 1GbE. What I found were a hundred different sellers all hawking the same adapter under different names I’ve never heard of, all organs of the CCP, anyway. Didn’t matter which e-commerce site I went to, it’s all the same for PC gear, now.

The StarTech adapter is what I ended up getting. Very speedy device, but gets pretty warm.

[WoodTurner]

I had a friend that worked at Fry's. They had a shrink wrap machine and would shrink wrap returns and put them back on the floor with no indication it was a return.

I worked at Fry's in the computer department as my first job. They definitely shrink wrapped returned product but it should have also been marked down with a big reduced price sticker.
The reduced price was only 5% so they would never sell. We had an insane amount of returned product on the shelf, especially GPUs just because no one is going to risk buying a used GPU for a couple bucks. Our store I never saw stuff get out back on the shelf without the discount, but seeing how that stuff wouldn't sell, I could imagine a different store doing some shady stuff.
Tons of problems with Fry's but I wish they were still around. They were fine to shop at if you knew what you needed.
Thing I miss most was the employee discount, 10% over cost of I remember right. Car audio was basically 50% off and thing like usb and HDMI cables were pennies.

[Scratch705]

it is sad that newegg is going the tigerdirect route.

it use to be that newegg was the online retailer to buy PC parts from. now, i rather make the drive to microcenter, or buy from B&H photo.

[ibanezfoo]

Newegg isn't the same company as a couple of years ago. It was purchased by the Chinese and they have visions of it becoming a giant ecommerce giant to challenge Amazon.

They are screwing up what was a great place to get your computer stuff.

It nosedived after it went public. Shame too. I built a number of computers from them in the years prior. It was my go to.

[ibanezfoo]

I bought a 56K modem at Frys and when I got home and plugged it in it would only connect at 14.4. Threw an AT command at the modem to see what it identifies as and sure enough it was a USR 14.4 and not the 56K that I bought. Had to drive back and yell at them about it and get my money back. Went and bought one from Circuit City or whatever.

Speaking of Circuit City, I bought a very expensive graphics card from them and when I plugged it in, same thing. Wrong product in the box.

From Walmart my mom bought my brother an N64 game he really wanted. On Christmas day when he opened it there was no cartridge just a pack of Nintendo playing cards. I felt so bad for him.

So its not unique to Frys...

[Robotron2k84]

Anyone tried PCPartPicker?

https://pcpartpicker.com/

Lets you build a project PC, from parts you select and searches out the best prices for them.

Still uses all the aforementioned vendors, but at least gives you a way to filter Newegg out.