Flutterby™! : The cost of retail

Charlene's been off for these two holiday weeks, and I've taken a few extra days, so with the time of both of us around the house we've managed to start on the remaining big house project: Wiring.

The bottom half of the house is old 2-wire Romex-like stuff, it bothers Charlene a bunch, but the part that really wigged me out was the lighting circuit, which was knob-and-tube, which had been patched and grafted on to, and then had insulation blown-in over it. In fact I didn't know that it was knob-and-tube, thought it had all been upgraded to the Romex-like material and there were just one or two vestiges to an exterior light fixture, 'til I tackled that.

At any rate, in the process of replacing and upgrading this wiring, we're starting to get the chance to upgrade some components. The bathroom now has 2 GFCI electrical circuits, which means we're ready to put in the fancy bidet seat. We can run a separate circuit for a ceiling heater fan combo. The living room ceiling fan box is no longer buried in insulation, so I can think about things like a thermostatic controller that'll turn on automatically to remove the thermocline that settles over the living room when we turn on the heater. Maybe even upgrade the ceiling fan, though I think I've put that off.

So we've got a grand or few in appliance-like hardware to buy. Some of this stuff is available at the big box stores, at least in the lower grades, some product lines are allegedly carried by dealers down in San Rafael or over in the East Bay, but all of it is available on-line.

In another vein, Charlene is jealous of my iPad and wants to get a tablet. Various stores around us carry the lower-end models, but none of them stock the ones you might actually want.

Here's the thing I find striking: Looking at and handling a product doubles the price. And, of course, there's no guarantee that if we drive the 20+ miles to the store they'll have anything we're interested in, just some products from the line. Further, for many things the only way to get them at the big box store (Home Despot, Lowe's, etc) is to order them. People talk about the value in retail being in able to handle the product first, but that's 50% hit and miss, and then the physical store wants double what the online store does to order it for you.

We've sucked it up and ordered online product. We'd like to be able to look at things, to support our more local economies, to reward value, but it just no longer makes sense to go retail. Merchandising has stopped meaning that much to us. The economy will be shifting, hard.