We're the same age and this was exactly how I felt going to CompUSA in the late 90s. My first big purchase was spending $85 on a 32mb SIMM module for my Pentium 1 system (maybe it was 2 16mb, I can't remember if they needed to be installed in pairs, maybe that was only ECC?). I would ogle the DVD burners and SCSI cards but couldn't afford either.
And then you discovered that there were online vendors who sold that same stick of RAM for $22 + S/H.
Back in those days, the price difference between stores and online/mail-order vendors was enormous. Mostly because the customer populations didn't overlap much, so they could get away with it. Also, the cost of shipping usually canceled out any cost/benefit with smaller items.
I was still much too naive about online orders back then. But you reminded me of the "rebates" fiasco. Remember those days? I once got my rebate rejected because I sent the original receipt and not a photocopy.
I worked at a CompUSA in college. Rebate rage was an incredible phenomena... I had a knife pulled on me once because of it in a return situation.
There was one crazy Packard Bell/AOL/Viewsonic rebate combo that was like $600. It had specific instructions that many people screwed up, and they were left with unreturnable (no bar code) crap gear. One guy got arrested for chaining himself to the bollards in front of the door in protest.
The amount of fraud these guys ran into was incredible too. We’d get raided by bus loads of Chinese people who would engage every employee while another crew cleaned out things like video cards and other small items. It was like a Viking raid. People would buy computers, print fake UPC/serial number stickers for rebates, strip the memory/disk and return them.
