There are a lot of different places you can get a PS3, but right off the bat I’m going to recommend that you buy one online for several reasons:
- There’s no good reason not to. Unless you need one as a birthday present for someone who’s birthday is tomorrow (and even then there’s overnight shipping) and you can actually find one available locally, there just isn’t a good reason to prefer buying one over the counter, and there’s usually a lot of good reasons not to do that (keep reading).
- You’ll tend to get better deals and better bundles online.
- You generally will not pay tax if you order online, whereas you definitely will unless you live in a state without sales tax (there are 5: Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, and Oregon)–this will almost always make a big difference in the price: if you’re paying $300 for a PS3 (that’s about the minimum you’ll get a new one for right at this moment) plus a 5% sales tax (relatively low–it’s higher than this in most states) that’s an additional $15 you’re paying that you wouldn’t have if you would’ve ordered online. But, I hear you saying, “you’ll pay for shipping and that will end up negating the money you would’ve saved by not paying tax!”: probably not. A lot of places, like Amazon, offer free shipping.
- As I previously mentioned, you often won’t pay for shipping by ordering online.
- You won’t have warranties and other crap you don’t want pushed on you by sales people.
- You’ll be able to use coupons (keep checking back here, I’m going to post any I can find, but also use Google) that you wouldn’t have been able to use in a store anywhere because coupon codes are typically online-only.