An Avowed Shopping Hater Runs a Little Comparison Test

By AARON CURTISS

Sept. 30, 1999 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

I understand that much of the American way of life is built on consuming huge quantities of junk no one needs, and I’m as patriotic as the next guy. It’s the physical act of shopping--the browsing, the comparing, the waiting in line--that turns me off.

So it seemed natural that the advent of online shopping would turn the Internet into a simple path leading me to an empyrean of goods delivered to my door, without my ever having to put on pants and leave the house.

I made my first credit card purchase from an e-tailer a little more than two years ago. In that time, I’ve come to feel that although the Internet is great for securing low-risk trinkets such as books and CDs, it has yet to replace real-life merchants selling something more complicated and expensive.

But to test this theory, I recently set out with a list of five items to comparison-shop between traditional suppliers and online sources, with an eye to both prices and the overall experience. My admittedly arbitrary, unscientific test began with a medley of middle-class wants: a new car, a home mortgage, a music CD, a PC and a round-trip airline ticket from L.A. to New York.

And the verdict? Shopping online may be easier, but brick-and-mortar stores sometimes had the best deal.

Car

1999 Honda CR-V EX

I started by doing some background research at https://www.honda.com and car reference site https://www.edmunds.com. Then I made price inquiries through two other popular car sites--https://www.autobytel.com and https://www.autoweb.com.

Autobytel.com and Autoweb.com act as intermediaries between buyers and dealers to give buyers a price they know is reasonable. Buyers tell the site what kind of cars they want with which options--it took me 15 minutes to type in each request--and the information is forwarded to local car dealers. (According to Honda.com and Edmunds.com, the car I requested has a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $20,450.)

Within 24 hours I got e-mail responses from two dealers: Miller Honda in Van Nuys offered me the car for $19,493 (excluding various taxes), and Gardena Honda offered the car for $19,394.

To try the conventional route, I then called Robertson Honda in North Hollywood. The salesman who answered quoted me an MSRP of $20,600. When I asked for an exact price quote, he asked me what other offers I had received. I explained that I wanted a blind bid. He pressed. I stood firm. But the conversation ended without his offering me a price.

If this were a car I had to buy right away, I would have gone to Gardena Honda because it offered the lowest price. Using the Web can help buyers get a good deal by providing lots of information. But there’s more to buying a car than just getting a price quote--car buyers still need to be decent negotiators, and the deal almost always has to be closed in person.

Mortgage

$300,000 30-year fixed-rate loan with 20% down

Online brokers boast that they lessen the hassle of applying for a mortgage and that you’ll pay less in the process.

Rather than send out a dozen mortgage applications blindly, I asked a real-estate-savvy friend for advice, and she recommended https://www.iown.com. It took about an hour to fill out the online form, which was encrypted and forwarded to a human being who then handles the process just as a real-world broker would. On the day I filled out my online paperwork, the best deal was for 7.625% interest with 0.125 points and $3,812 in closing costs.

The problem with comparing something such as a mortgage is that the “price” you see “advertised” is rarely the final price you actually pay. Anyone who has gone through the mortgage process knows that rates are subject to everything from the buyer’s credit history to how big the down payment is.

My mortgage broker, Ben Hunnicutt, brags that he has never lost a customer to an online broker. On that same day, he was able to offer a 7.75% mortgage with no points and $2,450 in closing costs.

By my math, going with Hunnicutt would cost me an additional $3,082.80 over the life of the loan. But that’s money spent over the long haul; a buyer would save about $4,362 up front with lower points and other fees. Money today is always dearer than money tomorrow. Discounting the cash flow over the 30 years at even a modest 5%, I would have actually saved a few bucks going through Hunnicutt.

The bottom line is that the difference is pretty small. For buyers who purchase or refinance homes rarely, or for those who need a little hand-holding through a complicated process, I’d prefer dealing with a real, live person.

Music CD

“Dizzy Up the Girl” by the Goo Goo Dolls

Amazon.com offered “Dizzy Up the Girl” for $11.88. Add $2.95 for shipping and the total price came to $14.83 for something delivered to the front door in under a week. Because I long ago registered with Amazon, the transaction took less than two minutes.

CDNow.com offered the same base price as Amazon, but its shipping was 4 cents more, and I would have had to pay an additional $1.06 in sales tax, bringing the total to $15.93. Because I had not shopped at CDNow before, it took a few minutes to register. Then I encountered server problems that required me to start my order over from scratch. So I just scratched it.

Then I drove to a Tower Records store, where the CD cost $12.99, or $14.06 with tax--77 cents cheaper than Amazon. I found the same CD at Target for $11.99, or $12.98 with sales tax--or $1.85 cheaper than through Amazon. Upshot: The price differentials are so small that time and convenience are probably the issues here.

Laptop Computer

IBM ThinkPad i-Series Model 1412

Most of my friends buy their PCs online. They say they’re sick of being treated like dirt at superstores, and they swear they can get the best deals online. It gets a little tricky, though, if a buyer has a specific model from a specific manufacturer in mind. Or if you’re the kind of buyer who likes to haggle over price and payment terms. Then the choice is not so clear.

Electronics retailer ValueAmerica.com did not have the laptop model I wanted--a fact I found out within two minutes of arriving. The task was made simple by a clear system of illustrated menus and pull-down dialogue boxes. The same was true of Shopping.com, which offers to search for particular models.

Buy.com may have had what I wanted, but I couldn’t find it. The search mechanism spit back too many hits. Who has time to flip through 86 pages of results? When I attempted to narrow the search, all I got was an error message. As it turned out, many of the products I may have been interested in were on back order, but it took 40 minutes before I found that out.

Using Altavista.com’s search engine took me to Wescocomputers.com, which offered a machine similar to the one I wanted--but with a 300-megahertz processor rather than a 366MHz--for $1,499, or $1,634.38 after taxes and shipping. But I had seen the machine I wanted advertised in The Times for about the same price. Why pay the same for a slower machine?

At IBM’s own shopping site, https://commerce.www.ibm.com, the machine I wanted cost $1,699, but the cost of shipping and tax isn’t listed until after customers put in all their data.

So into the real world I headed. After poring over Sunday ads in The Times, I drove to Best Buy in Canoga Park, where the machine I wanted was listed at $1,589.96. The store was offering 18 months’ financing with no interest--terms like that are a good deal as long as you pay what you owe before the due date. Total price: $1,721.14 with sales tax.

But three days later, Best Buy advertised the same machine on sale for $1,499.99--and the ad mentioned $100 off for a manufacturer’s rebate program. The price drop was new, but the rebate was not, and my store clerk had failed to mention the rebate. Back I went to Best Buy, where I stood in line for 30 minutes to get a refund of $97.39 and a rebate card.

After all that, the price of the machine came to $1,523.75--better than I was able to find online.

Plane Ticket

L.A. to New York Round Trip

This one was tougher than I expected. I wanted to fly from Los Angeles to New York in late October, and I was calling more than a month in advance. I wanted to leave early on a Thursday morning and return the next Monday afternoon, and I preferred that both legs be nonstop.

The travel sites I used were Cheaptickets.com, Travelocity.com and Microsoft’s Expedia.com. All three are easy to use, and each took about 20 minutes of shopping time, featuring straightforward interfaces that let users tinker with destinations, departure times and routing.

Cheap Tickets offered me a round-trip flight into Kennedy International for $295.73 on America West. But that flight was a red-eye that wouldn’t have delivered me to New York until Friday morning, and there was a stop in Phoenix. TWA offered a nonstop flight for $298.16, but it didn’t leave until 12:15 p.m., meaning I wouldn’t arrive until 8:27 p.m. The closest was an American Trans Air flight that left at 6:50 a.m. for $348.11. For a flight into LaGuardia, the lowest fare was on a Northwest flight, at $281.76, but this too was a red-eye.

Expedia.com offered a $313 flight to JFK on National Airlines leaving at 7:10 a.m., but it had a stopover. The cheapest direct flight at the times I wanted was a Continental flight into Newark, N.J., for $366.84. Travelocity.com offered much the same results, but it turned up a $336 flight with two stops on Access Air and a $351.44 flight with one stop on American Trans Air.

Then I tried dialing a couple of travel agencies. It was a Saturday afternoon. The Auto Club travel desk was closed. I called Nelson Custom Travel in North Hollywood and got quoted a fare of $499.67 for LAX to Kennedy.

Next, I called Continental directly--partly because I had a credit from an unused ticket. Continental’s $366.84 fare was still available, and I booked it over the phone. Had I not had the unused ticket, I would have booked the flight online for the same price and received my tickets in the mail.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Online vs. Offline Shopping Test

One shopper went hunting for the best deals in a highly unscientific search for five items. In this go-round, old-fashioned brick-and mortar sellers had the edge.

Car

Best price: Online

Price/Product: $19,394 for a 19999 Honda CR-V EX

Comments: Received e-mail price quote from two dealers within 24 hours.

Mortgage

Best price: Offline

Price/Product: 7.75%, no points, $2,450 in closing costs for a 30-year $300,000 fixed-rate loan (20% down)

Comments: For inexperienced buyers, a mortgage broker can offer hand-holding.

Best price: Offline

Price/Product: $12.98 for “Dizzy Up the Girl” by the Goo Goo Dolls

Comments: Price differences were small, so convenience is the issue here.

Laptop computer