A disappointing experience at a computer store

I did some more thinking about putting together a server recently and came to the conclusion that even though I would be paying a little more money to run my own server at home, I could get close to 4x more performance and unlimited hard drive space instead of renting one. I also though it would be a good experience to learn to set one up should I need to set one up online using one of the services like Amazon's AWS.

I put down the cash for server parts last Friday and so far, the CPU, motherboard, case and memory arrived. Since I was going for a server system, I didn't need a monitor or a fancy video card for the system which brought the price of the computer down considerably. When going for the slim computer case, I made the mistake of purchasing one without a built in power supply. Thinking that getting a power supply wouldn't be hard enough, I dropped by the closest physical computer store  I could find online only to be incredibly disappointed-- all the power supplies were really expensive and the cheap ones that they were selling were "sold out".

Obviously, I wasn't happy with spending the 20 minute (one way) commute on my scooter to get to the store, spend time looking around to find out that they didn't have what I wanted at a more expensive price.

After getting home, the first thing I did was go online to the Japanese equivalent of "pricegrabber.com" to source a part and I was done with making the order in about 10 minutes. The only difference is that the part will probably arrive in 2 days instead of me having it immediately, but when it comes to being busy, waiting isn't a terrible thing.

Over the past few years, I have been doing more and more online shopping instead of going to stores to buy things instead. It's simply more convenient. I really wonder how much has internet shopping had impacted the retail business and the number of old school stores that have gone out of business as a result of it.

I also move around every 2~3 years making finding new places to buy things fairly important to me somewhat time consuming. Ordering online never ceases to fail me since I get what I want delivered to me quick enough. But back to the computer stores, I really don't understand how they can keep up a business where people have to spend time to go to a place to buy over priced product. The only one possible answer that I can think of is for people that aren't as computer literate to talk to people to get what they need. If that information, too, can be accessed in a manner easy enough online, I think we can kiss the big box computer retail stores goodbye.