Frys in Woodland Hills, CA has Full Box for 14.99.
 

It's the full size box and it's selling for 14.99.

They have an aisle display and an end cap with a flat screen running the screen saver.

BUT they have a HORRIBLE sound system on the PC that makes the bubbles sound like glass breaking or something.

I stood there for a few minutes and watched people come from 30 and 40 feet away when they saw the thing. Then they would leave pretty quick. I think the sound was turning them off. One guy said to his firend, "that sound would get annoying after a while".

Talk to the software department manager. I talked to the sdm at the Houston store about a different issue and he was very receptive.

I will be going over there this week and maybe I'll just mention that.

What's with the 14.99 though? I thought that was the jewel case price (or is it bad memory). I was wondering if they are clearing them out or if PRolific issued them new ones at a lower price because it's 1.0 and not 1.1.

Just curious.

At that price, I won't mind buying a second copy just to get the box. ;)

I was in Fry's in Anaheim last night and they had Aquarium running on EVERY monitor in the computer department. They also had a big stack of the full boxes on the end of one of the computer tables. Kind of odd seeing Fry's doing smart marketing.

We have no control over what stores charge for the Aquarium. Fry's is obviously using it as a "loss leader" to get people into the store, buy monitors, upgrade their video cards, etc. Though this pricing policy may seem strange to the consumer, it's very common. We are quite happy with our relationship with Fry's.

I'm already getting e-mails from people asking why they should pay $21.95 on the website when you can get the boxed version for $14.99 in stores.

Well.

Wouldn't they have to upgrade for the lionfish, etc?

If Frye's sells them out and reorders, everyone still makes money. I would think anyway.

The upgrade to the Lionfish is free for 1.0 purchasers.

The upgrade to 1.1 is free for the CD purchasers, but probably not future upgrades.

My guess is that Jim Sachs has given special permission to Fry's to allow them to display his software without buying all the necessary copies. Fry's is normally very strict about not allowing any software to be installed on demo systems that did not come with that system originally.

Whatever the case, it seems to be working. Aquarium is selling very, very well. I've heard a lot of people ask where they can get a copy.

Fry's has bought all the copies necessary to do just about anything they want.

In Houston, when Fry's first got the Aquarium, it was one vertical row of about 6 boxes per shelf, 4 shelves. So 24 copies.

Now there are two entire RACKS of 4 shelves, approximately 160 copies. The Aquarium is now about 90% of the 'Screen Savers' section.

Nearly every LCD and CRT monitor is running the Aquarium. I counted approximately 60 displays running the Aquarium. Unfortunately, half of them were running off a woefully underpowered HPQ (Hewlett PaQard) Pavillion so 1024x768 was running about 20-25fps.

I imagine the first person who came up with the term Loss Leader must have been stared at and prescribed medication.

I used to work part time for Offic MAx. We had MANY items that were set up as loss leaders. We had a laser printer that we purchased for $1100 and sold it for $900. I always thought it was a typo in the system, but my manager explained it to me.

BTW... they can do that by what they charge for things that cost them almost nothing. For example, AA batteries are purchased for something like .20 for a pack of 4 (I'm not kidding) and sold for about $3. Talk about mark up! Paperclips are the same way, as are pencils and pens.

I heard somewhere that the largest margin in a store is found on platic bags (which cost about 20¢ over here). Are you yanks still using those brown paper bags with no handles over there?

/Tiny Profit

Here we have a choice "paper or plastic".

When I was in stationed in England I ran into a small problem. I went shopping with a buddy, and were suprised to find we had to "rent" the grocery cart. I think is was one pound.

Then, at the check out, with a FULL CART, we discovered the store does not have bags to put your groceries in. We were to provide them ourselves!!

We ended up reloading the cart, and putting it all in the trunk of the car, no bags. After that, we did all out shopping at the AF base commisary, where we had a choice of paper ot plastic. ^_^

OK. Up here in Ultima Thule there's a ~$1 deposit associated with using a cart, but you'll get it back on return of it. (Never thought I'd find myself discussing grocery carts and shopping bags here – isn't the internet great?)

/Tiny Deposit

I usually get one paper bag and the rest plastic when I shop. I save all the plastics up until I have a great heap of them. Then tote them all back over to the store to recycle them.

I use the paper bag under the sink for paper waste or for when I clean my bird cages. ^_^

It works out pretty well.

I used to work for Orchard Supply Hardware and we had a problem with the bums running off with all our shopping carts. We had to gather them all up at night, load them in a long line and hook a tremendous linked chain through each one and lock them up. I always felt like a mouse sewing up giant armor with a chain link thread. It took forever.

Before we would just gather them from the parking lot and line them up for the morning.

From what I understand each one of those carts is around 500 bucks or so. Yeeouch.

In spain most shops will give you only plastic, and without any extra cost (you don't pay bags).

Now some shops are beginning to sell their bags, so you take your own bags, or you pay 3 euro cents for each bag.

About carts... small shops have their carts inside the shop so nobody can steal them, but big malls have the carts parked outside and they have some kind of a lock that ties a cart with the previous one on the file. You insert a coin (usually 50 euro cents) and the lock is freed so you can use that cart. When you finish, you move that cart again against another one, and plug the connector of that cart inside your lock, dropping your coin back to you.

Hard to explain, but I can't find better words, sorry.

In the US, each cart has a little wireless-activated mechanism which locks one of the wheels if you move the cart outside a wireless fence.

Hpman
I understood you perfectly.