[WriteLog] RE: 4N33's For Sale

[Marty Tippin]

At 05:35 PM 1/20/01 -0500, Ted Roycraft wrote:
>Digikey has 4N33's for $.30 in quantities of one.


Ted is correct - Digikey (www.digikey.com) has them for $.30 each.
Mouser (www.mouser.com) shows the same price, but they're out of stock.
Newark (www.newark.com) has them in stock for $.34 each

Sounds like a bargain, right? I'm ripping you off by offering them at a 
gouging $.50 each, right?

Well, lets look at this a little closer:

Mouser doesn't have them in stock, so we'll leave them out of the 
discussion. Digikey has them in stock, but also has a $5 handling charge on 
orders under $25. And they'll charge shipping on top of that. Newark has 
the same policy as Digikey.

So, say you want 6 4N33's from Digikey. That's $1.80. Plus the $5 handling 
charge. Plus, say, $3.50 shipping (priority mail). Total then is $10.30, or 
a whopping $1.72 each. Not such a bargain.

Now let's look what I'm doing (which, by the way, is nothing more than 
making these things available to fellow RTTY enthusiasts at a much more 
reasonable price than you'll find anywhere else):

I buy them in quantities of 100, for $.258 each. Shipping to me is $3.50 
(roughly), for an order total of $29.30, or a unit cost of $.293. Postage 
to send them to you costs $.34, and I have to buy a padded envelope (from 
OfficeMax), at a cost of about $.30 each, tax included, in quantities of 25.

So, do the math and you find that, to send 6 of these little beauties to 
you, it costs me $2.40. You pay $3.00, which means I make a profit of a 
whopping 60 cents. For a quantity of 2, I end up profiting 52 cents.


Now, if you can get these little devices somewhere else for less than the 
price I'm asking, please do so - and let me know where you're getting them 
from!  But if you need a small quantity of these devices (which you can't 
get at Radio Shack, by the way), I hope you find my services useful.

73 and sri for the bandwidth...

-Marty NW0L
  martyt@pobox.com


--
WWW:                      http://www.writelog.com/
Submissions:              writelog@contesting.com
Administrative requests:  writelog-REQUEST@contesting.com
Problems:                 owner-writelog@contesting.com