Jul 23rd, 2008
SkyMall: Do the Inflated Prices of Airports and Airlines Extend to this Catalog?
If you’ve been on a plane in the U.S.–and maybe outside the U.S., I’ve never traveled internationally–you’ve unquestionably seen the SkyMall catalog tucked into a pocket on the seat or wall in front of you. It’s a neat browse and kind of reminds me of the old Johnson Smith Company mail order catalogs I loved to check out when I was growing up. There’s all kinds of neat stuff in there, some of which are gadgets and some of which are not.
While blogging on some of the frugal challenges of traveling the past few days, I also wondered while looking at the SkyMall catalog: how well are these items priced? When I was saving my allowance as a youngster to order stuff from Johnson Smith, I knew that these were not items which I could easily find locally and since there was no Internet back then, mail order catalogs would be about my only alternative source. In other words, there wasn’t a lot of competition, and as we know, competition tends to benefit the consumer. But today, with big box stores and the Internet everywhere (even SkyMall has a Web site!), how do SkyMall’s prices stack up versus the competition?
Not all that great. Picking one of the items that is likely to be popular, a 250 gigabyte Western Digital Passport hard drive, SkyMall lists it for $149. A quick search shows that this drive can be had from Dell for under $100! Looking quickly at another, a Garmin Nuvi 770 sells at SkyMall for a walloping $799.99; a look at Amazon.com finds an Amazon reseller with the same product for $545.45.
To be fair, SkyMall does combine a lot of different types of item into one catalog, and some of the items I’ve never seen before (the Upside Down Tomato Garden is one thing I find intriguing). But when shopping on price, they largely don’t compare versus the competition, and that speaks volumes. I will definitely check out their catalogs when I travel, but I don’t plan on ordering from them anytime soon.
[...] Cents suggests that, while you’re on that flight, you be wary of the prices in the SkyMall magazine. Given the airline industry, that doesn’t really surprise [...]
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