Great anecdote from "Users, not Customers"

I just started the book "Users, not Customers: Who Really Determines the Success of Your Business." It starts with a great short anecdote about comparison shopping in our brave new world. If the rest of the book stays as intriguing, this will be a great read.

"My wife loves seltzer water. I can’t stand it, but she will hardly drink water if bubbles aren’t in it. So I thought it’d be great to buy her a soda maker. One afternoon, I passed by a Williams-Sonoma store and decided to stop in. Lo and behold, they had one sitting on the shelf: a SodaStream Genesis drinks maker for $150. But it seemed expensive. I could buy her a pantry full of 150 bottles of premade seltzer for that price. So I decided to shop around. 

I opened the RedLaser app on my iPhone and used it to scan the machine’s bar code to find out what other retailers charged. Bed Bath & Beyond carried the same thing for a hundred dollars. Success! Fifty dollars in savings. I waved down a sales clerk and showed her my findings. But she declined to match the price. 

So right there, in the middle of a beautiful Williams-Sonoma store in a high-rent location on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, I bought the SodaStream Genesis drinks maker—from Bed Bath & Beyond by using my mobile browser."