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From: stewart@ihldt.UUCP (R. J. Stewart)
Newsgroups: net.consumers
Subject: Re: Insider's Card
Message-ID: <2523@ihldt.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 28-Sep-84 10:13:02 EDT
Article-I.D.: ihldt.2523
Posted: Fri Sep 28 10:13:02 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 29-Sep-84 10:32:37 EDT
References: <237@sdchema.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Naperville, IL
Lines: 31

> I received a offer in the mail recently for a MasterCard called the
> Insider's Card, which is linked to an organization called
> Comp-u-Store.  They run a database of the `cheapest' suppliers of
> consumer goods.  You call them up, get the price and make your order
> if you wish, charging it to your Insider's Card.  Does anyone have
> any experience of these people? 

We had one of these cards for a couple of years, but discontinued it.
While it seems to be legit, it was not economical for several reasons:

1) The card has a yearly fee, while my wife and I both have cards with
   no fee.  (If your current MC/VISA has a fee, the economics may work
   out differently for you).

2) Their prices are good but not great.  We found that we could always
   do as good or better by looking for sales or checking in discount
   stores. 

3) Their selection is limited.  While their list of suppliers is
   impressive, they don't always have every model of a particular
   product line available.  Also, the people that you call to get
   their prices are not trained well and often can't tell you what you
   want to know.

The real advantage to this service was the ability to call up and check
prices to find out how much we could expect to pay for an item.  After a
while we decided that we could do just as well by looking in the Sears
sale catalogs.

Bob Stewart
ihldt!stewart