David's World

December 30, 2004

buying computer hardware at the grocery store

I'm in Germany over Christmas and New Year's. That's not exactly a culture shock - there are not too many shocking things in this country. One oddity is that, from time to time, people get to buy PCs or some other fairly expensive IT products at their local grocery store!
Obviously, you don't want to ask the girl at the checkout for advice about these things.
But many people don't need to.

So the other day, I got up early and made it to the next discounter at 8.15am, just after they had opened. I was lucky to get an external Firewire/USB2.0 hard drive with 250 GB capacity for only 149 Euros. That's enough for 320 decent-quality movies, or 22 weeks of continuous music.

During the five minutes we were in that store, around seven other people bought the hard drive, and they had only three left. Sometimes it's a good idea to get up early!