Busmaster - Yeah, I keep wondering if I'm screwing up by waiting a little while to use the coupon. I've already applied it to my account (don't worry, I won't go into details), so I'm not too terribly worried about it. It's just that there's nothing I really want to buy.
Honestly, I've been also wondering if the "bare shelves" approach wasn't part of the plan for this promotion. It seems that the stuff they are out of just happens to be the stuff with reasonable prices. Or more to the point, the only stuff they have left is the stuff with way-inflated prices.
My hope is that now that MCI isn't giving out any more new GC's, perhaps the shelves will slowly start to fill back up. Interestingly, I've been looking at the CD-RW section several times per day for the last few weeks and they've had NOTHING of interest available. All the Plextors, for instance, were out of stock with no potential ship date and no backorder info (but they were still listed on the site). Now that we've probably gotten over the hump of people using these GC's, VOILA! this morning they had a few "new" drives in the list that weren't there last night.
However, the ones they are all the sudden selling are older. I think they had a 8x4x32 Plextor for $158 or something, and an identical Iomega drive for about the same price. {UPDATE: It appears the Plextor is gone again now, but the 8x4x32 Iomega is still there for $159.} If you're a conspiracy theorist (like I obviously am), it seems that they wanted the bulk of the MCI GC's to go for stuff with really exorbitant margins because people would be saying "well, I *DID* get $150 off...". And now they're going to start throwing out a few older items they need to clean off the shelves for the next stage of people. I figure I'll wait a little while longer and see what happens a little closer to the deadline. They won't be able to afford to keep the shelves bare for TOO much longer.
(Of course, the other option is that perhaps I'm certifiably crazy and Amazon isn't playing any kind of game here at all...)
Acme