Florida Guide > Miscellaneous
Buying electrical items in the US
The first question on everyone’s minds ‘Is Florida cheaper than the United Kingdom?’
Well from my experience buying electrical equipment in the United States is much better value than buying back home. Here are some reasons why.
Firstly you have (at the moment of this going to press) a great exchange rate to the pound, by converting pounds – Dollars you will make a little on the exchange rate. In some cases this can be a lot if you intend to buy a large electrical item.
Secondly some of the large manufactures like Sony, Panasonic tend to price cheaper (not always the case), but some items like PSP’s or Apple IPOD’s are priced a lot cheaper even with a poor exchange rate.
Some places to visit for good electrical deals are Best Buy (located near the Florida Mall) and for some items Walmart can also be very good. I found that these stores are good If you know what item you want as they have mass stock rooms that hold just about every electrical gadget under the sun. Other places to try are the smaller electrical retailers along the 192 or International drive. Again these are very good but beware that the price is very often never on the item you want and you will get the hard sell as soon as you walk in. If you are very good at driving a bargain these can be good fun in striking a deal. Just beware you hold your nerve when you do as you could end up paying more than you should.
On occasion you will find that the latest models normally preview around 6 months before they do in the UK. This is something to watch out for as well as different model numbers. In the US a lot of their digital movie camcorders have different numbers to the UK ones.
So what can you save, at the time of me writing this article I saved £45 on a 20gb IPOD and £25 on a PSP, so they are savings not to be sniffed at.
Some points to remember is the voltage is different on all items sold in the US, before you buy make sure you ask if it will work back home, for digital camcorders they will only work on US TV’s, unless you have a model that does both (Sony are good for this), otherwise all you will need is a good DVD program to copy all your movies to, this gets round the problem.
Lastly make sure you are going to make a saving as not all items are cheaper than some of the UK web based sites. Happy shopping!
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