On reflection, yesterday was a pretty good day. Not only because I got a good bargain, but because that bargain proved to me beyond anything else that the high street, as under pressure as it is, is still the place to shop.

                This story actually began a couple of weeks ago, when I bought a PSP with the newly found wealth that came with my first post-grad job (meagre as it may be on minimum wage doing work that should really earn me £10 per hour minimum… but don’t tell my boss I said so!). The whole reason for this purchase was that I have an Xbox360, and am therefore prevented access to my favourite video game series of them all, Wipeout. The one game that I was desperate for was Wipeout Pure, a game that was out of stock in the shop that I purchased the system.

                I thought to myself, ‘Ah, that’s OK, I’ll pick it up somewhere else’, and I did try, but i happened to buy my PSP just as every shop in the world decided to stop stocking the game I had waited for since its release, some years back now. So, ‘what’s the problem?’ I hear you cry. ‘Get on Amazon.co.uk or Play.com and pick it up there! It’s Easy!’.

                While it may be easy, in this case, the game is so old, even the big online retailers don’t stock it, leaving 3rd party rip-off merchants to sell it for a penny and charge £10 for shipping costs. The cheapest I could find it online was £6.00. While, I was willing to pay that, I don’t like waiting for products to come through the post, because I’m almost never in during daytime hours and collecting it can be a real pain. That on top of the fact that I’ve had issues buying things online before (such as buying something listed as English and it coming in German and buying £50 worth of Christmas presents and getting charged for two of everything, all of which cost me more to return than I paid for them) and so I don’t quite trust it as a result.