The good folks over at CNET have a great write up about why you should not buy cables at a brick and mortar retail joint (i.e., Best Buy, Target, etc) but instead buy them online. Take a quick look for some surprising information.
You know how it is when you get a new toy. You really want to get everything hooked up and play with it. So I looked around to see what it would cost me to just pick up a cable locally. What I got instead was a reminder that, almost universally, cables sold at retail carry an incredible markup relative to their cost or even to what you can find online in quantity one.
And I’m not talking Monster Cable fancy-pants stuff either. The cheapest generic 6-foot HDMI cables that I could in Best Buy and Target in-store inventory were going for $29.99–a 300 percent premium over the $9.95 I spent at Amazon.com (which wasn’t even that great an online price, but the shipping was free).
