Comparison Shopping

So I was going about my day just working on the sermon for next Sunday. The Gospel text is from Luke 3:1-6, which quotes Isaiah 40 (A voice cries out: In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God…). I pulled a commentary off my shelf on Isaiah that I’ve had since seminary. The following inner dialog ensued:

This is a really good commentary. I wonder if the whole series is available. I should check their website… wow, I didn’t know Bruce Metzger was the editor of the series. Hrm… $32 a volume… (here the dialog paused while I tried to multiply $32 by 66 books in the Bible…. then the pause in the dialog paused while I launched the windows calculator and came up with $2,112… <insert long slow Wow that’s expensive whistle…>) Hey, it’s on CD-ROM too.

At this point the internal dialog got muddied as I realized that there were two copies of the commentary series on CD-ROM, one for $650 and one for $999. Huh? Well, what’s the difference? Can’t tell. Several minutes worth of investigating later, still can’t tell the difference. This is not helped by the fact that they both link to the same description of what is included in the package.

I asked someone else to look at them and he wondered if it was their own version of the stupidity tax. Now I’ve seen differences in the same product at the same site. If you go to the site one way (such as by using their search option) you can get a different result than if you go in another way (such as by entering a product number from a catalog). But I have never seen two items apparently identical which were cross referenced to each other, where one was several hundred dollars less than the other.

Clicking the links to Buy Now at Amazon.com gave two slightly different names to the programs: The Word Biblical Commentary On Cd-rom : 54 Volume Edition [$999.99] and The Electronic Word Biblical Commentary [$454.98]. The latter also included a link to the former as Other editions: Audio CD (CD-ROM). Of course neither of them really is an audio CD (which would be either spoken word or song). By looking at the covers of both volumes (compare $454 cover [GIF] to the $1000 cover [jpg]… hey, maybe that’s the difference? For an extra $546 you get a JPG instead of a GIF?) reveal that the covers are identical.

Except that the version that sells for $454.98 has a sticker on the box which reads: Publisher’s List Price $1,499 NOW $999.97.

I kid you not, follow the link above for the $454.98 version and then click the link for see larger photo and it will lead you to the GIF image I have linked above, and the sticker is clearly visible on the left hand side of the box.

Hrm… $999.97? The website said $999.99! Well, at least one of them did, although I no longer remember which one.

Finally tonight I went back to the original website site and looked at the printer friendly pages (1, 2) which lists the $999 as being discounted to $650, meaning (apparently, but who can tell) that they are selling either version for the same price on their website. It was nice to see them agree on something at least… But there was one other thing… Both pages also agree on one other detail as well:

Both versions of out of stock. (I hope the $999 version didn’t sell out before the $650 version.)

So I went back to the Amazon.com site and added the $454.98 version to my Amazon.com Wishlist. Do whatever you like with the $545.01 that you will save off the list price, or the $1044.02 off the original list price!