Amazon Prime Day is coming soon—landing discounts in our laps come Tuesday July 16 and Wednesday 17—but of course, it's not just the Bezos Boys keen to find ways to part you from your summer holiday fund with tempting new tech deals. Oh no, the likes of Newegg, Micro Center, and B&H Photo are all going to have rival sales to keep Amazon on its toes.
And so is Best Buy… in fact, it's just started one today. And the good news is you can largely ignore it. I've spent a while going through the Member Deals Days promotion and there isn't much here for PC gamers looking for a bargain.
Almost every time I found something that looked kinda promising, with a tempting extra discount for My Best Buy Plus members, I could find something better or cheaper elsewhere. For reference, My Best Buy is the company's membership program, which you can join for free to get free shipping. But you can pay $50 a year to upgrade to a My Best Buy Plus membership, which is where you start getting exclusive discounts.
But so far I've yet to see a deal that's made me feel that a $50 outlay would be worth it for the offset discounts you might see in this week's sale.
Admittedly, the Amazon Prime Day event is based around a similar members-only deal conceit, but as it will give out 30-day free memberships like balloons at a kid's birthday that's hardly an equivalence in real terms.
There is a $180 By Best Buy Total membership that gets you cheaper repairs, 24/7 tech support, and includes protection plans, but you'd have to be a Total @$%* to spend that much on a membership card for a retailer IMHO.
In Best Buy's defence, however, if you are already a Plus member, for your sins, then you can find some decent deals on cheap Logitech mice. But yeah, that's hardly going to get you scrabbling around desperately for your credit card in order to sign up, is it?
So, here are just a few reasons not to bother with Member Deals Days:
Reason 1: Bad Blades
You can buy the 2023 Razer Blade 14 from Best Buy with a whopping extra $237 knocked off the already discounted sticker price. That gives you a total saving of $500 off one of the best compact gaming laptops of the last generation. That makes the final price for Plus members just $1,899.99.
Coincidentally, that's exactly the same price as you can buy a 2023 Razer Blade 14 from Amazon or Razer itself, except Best Buy is making its members pay that price for an RTX 4060 version, while Amazon and Razer will give you the RTX 4070 for the same price without a $50 membership buy-in.
Reason 2: Overpriced OLED
The 49-inch super mega ultrawide OLEDs have absolutely crashed in price since launch. And they weren't launched all that long ago, either. We first saw such a beast in Samsung's Odyssey G9, and again in the Asus ROG Swift OLED PG49WCD but the Gigabyte version has the same panel and far lower sticker price. So when you've got Best Buy offering an identical MSI MPG 491CQP for $1,000, but with a $50 discount for members, it's still $50 more than the Gigabyte Aorus CO49DQ that even Best Buy is selling for $900 without needing a membership to be eligible.
Reason 3: GP... ewwwww
It's a similar situation when it comes to graphics cards in the Member Deals Days sale. The members are getting weaker offers than normal humans can get from all around the interwebs. It's offering the Gigabyte RTX 4070 Ti Super Aero OC for $880, with an extra $50 off for its Plus members.
Okay, if you want the white aesthetic specifically, maybe the extra $30 you'll have to pay over the price of the triple-fan, well-cooled Zotac RTX 4070 Ti Super at $800 will make sense to existing Plus folk. But it's not going to make the rest of us rush out for a membership card.
'But it's overclocked!' They may cry.
'No one cares!' Should be the response. It's a paltry and utterly nominal 45 MHz higher clock speed, that not one person will notice in terms of a performance increase. Save your money—even if you're a Plus member—and buy the Zotac instead.
Reason 4: Slightly Elite
In fairness to Best Buy, it is offering the Microsoft Elite Series 2 controller for $179.99, with $29 off for members. That makes it $150 and the cheapest price we can find for the Elite pad, but only if you're a Plus member. But Newegg actually has it cheaper than Best Buy's standard price if you're not a member, and that's going to be a better recommendation for most PC Gamers.
Reasons to be cheerful
As I noted at the start, though, there are a couple of products that might make you, if not happy then at least not unhappy you'd dropped $50 on a Best Buy Plus membership. Though, being honest, these are already good deals before you get into the membership stuff and you're only saving a tiny amount extra with Plus on your side.
