I got a 120 GB WD SE for the same price just after Thanksgiving and it has been running fine, so far (fingers crossed). It does make a bit more noise when seeking than my old 80GB SE that I had in my system for over a year. After I got my new drive the old one went into a Shuttle SFF system I put together for my wife's grandma for Christmas, got shipped across the US and is still working fine. So far I've not had any trouble with any of the WD drives I've bought.
At your shop tedinde, do you buy any retail drives or just OEM? It's possible that the OEM drives may not be QC'd quite as stringently as the retail boxed drives. I'm sure the majority of Dell, Gateway and HP customers will have no idea what brand their drives are when it fails and needs to be replaced, so they don't worry about tranishing their reputation by cutting a few corners in the QC department to save money. I'd say that they the suits at WD figure that public perception rides on the reliability of their boxed product, so I'd expect those drives to get tested more thoroughly before they go out the door.
I don't know if this is what actually happening, but I do know that the one drive that I've owned which has gone teats-up on me has been an OEM version, whereas all of my retail drives have worked flawlessly. I haven't bought a whole lot of drives, so it isn't exactly scientific, but I'd be curious to know if anyone who has bought a lot of both retail and OEM drives has seen more failures with the OEMs.