Beware those big "bargain" stores

A lot of people think that just because something is at Sam's Club, it is a better price than anywhere else. Don't get me wrong. I know that some things there are great deals - you just have to make sure you are really getting as good a deal as you think you are.

Let me backtrack a few years. Justin and I had rolls of lifesavers as wedding favors. They were very cute - here are the customized wrappers that we got to put over the existing packaging:


Anyway - after getting all the wrappers, I just needed to get 300 rolls of lifesavers. I was at Wal-mart and priced them, just so that I could see what a better deal I would be getting when I bought them all at Sam's. To my surprise, they were about $.50 more per pack of 10 at Sam's than they were at Wal-mart. Since I was buying 30 packs, I left and went back to Wal-mart so I could save $15.

Now on to today - we ran out of black ink for our printer. Our printer takes 6 different ink cartridges and although we had a back-up for light pink and light blue we didn't have another black one. How we buy the ink depends on all the other ink levels. Each color cost anywhere from $10-$12 to replace and the black usually costs about $20 since it is a larger cartridge. In the past when all the other levels are looking low, we have bought a package that contains all six cartridges and 150 4"X6" sheets of photo paper at Best Buy for around $40. We haven't done much photo printing so we now have quite the stash of photo paper - but even if we are just using the ink, it is a much better deal to buy the big pack.

We looked at the ink levels and it looks like the next ones to go are going to be the two colors that we already have back-ups for so really we just needed black ink. I decided that I could probably get a package of 2 black ink cartridges at Sam's Club for around $30 so I headed there this morning.

How surprised was I to see that not only could I not just buy black ink for our printer at Sam's, but that the 6 cartridge multi-pack (without any photo paper) was $58.96 (+ tax)! I knew that we hadn't bought ink for a while, but surely the price hadn't gone up that much. I went next door to Best Buy and bought the multi-pack (with photo paper) for $35.99 + tax. That means that (including tax) it was $25 less to buy the ink at Best Buy than it was to purchase it at Sam's.



And that is supposed to be a "club" price at Sam's? Shame on you!