The Official Wirewize Blog

If you’re one of the lucky ones out shopping for home tech in what retailers are saying will be the slowest holiday shopping season in decades,  you’re lucky in more ways than one.  The state of the U.S. economy, most notably the credit crunch and the downturn in consumer spending, has created a perfect storm of woe for the major consumer electronics companies.

Which is great news for you, the lucky one out shopping for a deal this holiday season.

Take HDTVs. Please. No really, pretty please?  The deals that are out there, fueled by a glut of oversupply from guess where in Asia, are a seller’s nightmare and a buyer’s dream. Last year Sharp introduced its 52-inch LC-52D64U LCD TV at a list price around $3,800.  Now you can find one for $1,499 and oh what the heck, they’ll throw in a shiny new Blu-Ray player for free.  Samsung was asking $2,699 for the similarly sized LN52A630 LCD TV when it was introduced it this past summer.  Shop around now and you’ll find one for about half the price.  Just last year the smart reviewers were recommending Panasonic’s TX-42PX80U 42-inch plasma to their friends at around $1400.  Now you can easily find it for $650 or less. Granted, it’s “only” a 720p set, but that’s plenty good enough for most folks, and compared to the dreck (and we mean dreck) one might otherwise buy in a cheap 1080p LCD set at the local CostClubMart, the thing is a steal.

And that’s just TVs.  A cursory look at HTIBs shows full systems with DVD built in for as little as $200, not that we recommend dreck, as noted earlier.  But watching Sony, Panasonic, Samsung and others gamely asking $1000-1500 for HTIBs with Blu-Ray built in this holiday, we can only smile and say talk to us again in February.

Speaking of audio (someone’s got to), recent forecasts from the Consumer Electronics Association have confirmed what most people already knew; that MP3 players and docks are pretty much what’s selling these days.  Full-size receivers and speakers (remember?) are rarely demonstrated or even connected at the places where most people buy their electronics — and clueless retailers wonder why nobody’s buying them. So why not check out  a 100-watt 5.1 Dolby Digital receiver for less than $120, or a 7-channel model with HDMI for $200, over the web instead of at a brick and mortar retailer?  Your ability to judge its sound quality would be the same.  Just make sure that the return and warranty policies are too.

In this winter of the consumer electronics industry’s discontent, sobering lessons about supply and demand will be learned. Hopefully this will bring about a stronger overall CE landscape out the other end, when the consumer economy recovers.  It had better, because the oversaturated status quo of the consumer electronics industry as we know it simply can’t hold much longer.

What if there really were too many brands out there on the market, and too few legitimate retailers to sell them?  A quick look at Amazon shows a whopping 259 surround sound speaker systems to choose from, not to mention 1,180 DVD players and 1,299 televisions.  Would it be un-American to suggest that this may in fact be too much freedom of choice?

It goes without saying that in a cut-throat selling environment like this one, profit margins – the stuff that keeps the CE makers and sellers in business – are also at an all time low.  What would you say if we told you that the average profit margin on a DVD player was only $1.00?

Now what if we told you that was true as far back as 2004?

Enjoy the too many choices and the too deep discounts while you can.  They won’t go on forever.

#  #  #