News for 02/09/2008

Everyone knows that cables are a ripoff. When you buy a new HDTV from Best Buy or Circuit City, the store only makes a few dollars off the TV; where they make their real money is on the overpriced Monster Cables. Pretty much every techie knows this, and perhaps the non-techies learned about it this week, when Consumerist ran this story about it. It seems that a Radio Shack employee faxed Consumerist an internal Radio Shack memo that contained the retail price, wholesale price, and markup percentages for all Monster Cables the chain carries. And the sheer profit margin on them is, quite frankly, breathtaking. A 19 foot Monster HDMI-DVI cable costs Radio Shack just $99.94; the store then truns around and sells them for $179.99. An 8 foot Monster component cable costs you $91.99, but one costs the Radio Shack store only $41.60 –  a markup of 219%! Don’t get me wrong folks: Monster Cables are quality cables. It’s just that buying Monster Cables are like paying $400,000 for a 2008 Mercedes C-Class (average actual price: $35,000). I almost want to ask the people that run Monster Cable how they sleep at night… but I already know the answer: on top of a huge pile on money!

If you’re the kind of person that actually likes Monster Cables, you might be interested in this: a $6 million home theatre. Known as the Kipnis Studio Standard, this baby sports an 18′ x 10′ Stewart screen and a Sony SRX-S110 projector that upscales Blu-ray and HD-DVD movies. Click the link to check out Engadget’s post about it – they couldn’t be bothered to even get in to the audio portion of the theatre.

Strawberry CheetosStrawberry Cheetos? What will those crazy Japanese think of next?

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