[TriLUG] Computer stores] - A mass reply re: Intrex

[Derek Linz]

Joe:
I read what you said to Tim, he (and I) thank you for the praise/support, it 
means a lot coming from someone who has all of our respect.

Intrex Doesn't Have What I Want:
Unfortunately, there's virtually no margin on the bigger ticket hot-items, 
it's not uncommon for the price to drop fast enough that we're selling a lot 
of them at or below cost. We're always happy to special order a specific item, 
but in single quantities, depending on the distributor, we may not be able to 
be competitive. It's the price of being a smaller company.

Intrex Gives Trilug Discounts:
This seems to keep coming up and it seems like people are doubting this fact, 
but we do, actively. Present your TriLUG membership card for discount pricing. 
Discount pricing is tied to profit margin and ranges from about 1% off to 70% 
off, depending on the item. Pretty much any cable is going to be  25-70% off 
with a TriLUG card.  If any store doesn't recognize the card, have them call 
Durham, I think we see the most of them.

Website Analytics:
I could be wrong, but I sincerely doubt any analysis of web traffic is 
happening.

How are they in Business?
Since the economy took a dive, things have shifted a great deal. To boil it 
down, labor is how Intrex stays in business in a down economy.

-Derek Linz

On Thursday, July 21, 2011 09:45:40 AM Joseph Mack NA3T wrote:
> On Thu, 21 Jul 2011, Brian Henning wrote:
> > But how much more often is a hard drive just a hard drive?
> 
> I used to keep track of which manufacturers had the best
> (least likely to fail) drives and I would scour the
> internet each time I wanted another drive. I never had good
> data on which drives were good.
> 
> I find that Intrex does that for you. They know which drives
> fail and they don't carry them - they don't want returns. I
> asked Tim, the manager at the Durham store about drives one
> day. He said that it's not by manufacturer. One manufacturer
> can be good this year but not the next. Even within
> manufacturers, some drives are good and some aren't. Tim
> showed me the return numbers for the disk he carries (low
> single digit %). Intrex gives you an extended (3 weeks?)
> time to return a drive if it's bad, so you don't have to
> deal with sending it back to the manufacturer if it dies
> tomorrow. The extended time is plenty to run bad blocks.
> I've had one drive fail badblocks and Intrex exchanged it
> without any hassle. All the drives that survived badblocks
> have run beyond their warrantee.
> 
> I happily buy all my drives from Intrex now.
> 
> Joe