Hardware Prices Suck
Just found another local place to get hardware cheap... A-Power Online. They sound like atic.ca, another hole in the wall. Of course, they have the hard drives I just bought for more than $30 cheaper :( I realize a whole week has gone by, but geez....
Actually I've shopped at A-Power several times now and gotten stuff from their Richmond store and have had no problems with them, in fact I found their store quite nice...small, but still nice. The people there are actually somewhat friendly as well.
Another store we use is MBS Computers in Surrey ( unfortunately they don't have their prices online ). Their prices are fairly similar to A-Power and they offer a discount if you pay cash.
I bought all the pieces for my system through A-Power in Burnaby last January. After choosing everything I phoned down on the Friday and asked them to check on the items. They said they had them all in stock and when I got there Saturday morning they were all boxed and ready for me. Really good people. And they even caught the fact that I had forgotten a keyboard in my list of parts. ;-)
That stuff is cheaper than my "wholesale" pricing. Plus some of my wholesalers are adding penalties for orders less that $1000 so what was once OK to do yourself is sometimes more pain than it's worth. I could make more money if I resold from one of these "retailers"... Yikes.
I'm just glad I'm not trying to make my living on those margins. Only a little on the side and most of my "profit" comes from tax savings....