While I'm sure many of these will apply to year round sales, I've noticed certain things that companies really push hard during the holidays which often amount to pure highway robbery. I thought maybe people would like to chime in on what and where they are robbing the people that don't bother to check it out.

A couple of my examples:


Any type of electronics related cable. At several places I've been to while Christmas shopping, they have much larger than normal displays of HDMI, component, and just about anything else cables. Of course with holiday electronics sales people need them, but the prices are insane! I've seen HDMI cables retailing for $50 plus that I can buy at another retailer for $5. Wholesale on a lot of those things has to be almost nothing at all.


Warranties/protection plans - I picked up an Ipod Shuffle for my wife, along with some earbuds that were better than the included crap. A cashier at Best Buy tried over and over to sell me the extended warranty/protection crap, to the point that I finally told him either finish the transaction or I'd move to another register.

The protection plan was actually fairly cheap in both cases. In the case of the earbuds I pointed out to him that they have a 100% lifetime replacement warranty, and they will even give 50% credit to a person admitting abuse destroyed them. He just didn't seem to grasp that I didn't want to pay for something included in the sale price.


We've all seen the real good deals and such, but where are you seeing the high mark up items?