Best Buy uses membership fee as indirect graphics card price hike method

If you lot idea the all-time graphics cards' current inflated prices were bad, wait until yous hear what Best Buy is upwardly to. The retailer has taken to setting a portion of its available product bated exclusively for those who hop aboard its $200-per-year Totaltech membership.

This isn't a new miracle. Best Buy has done its Totaltech schtick before with products such as the highly sought-after PS5. Still, information technology'southward always worth noting when consumers can expect an already bad state of affairs to become artificially worse.

In this particular instance, Best Buy was gatekeeping RTX 30-series Founders Edition cards behind its membership setup. The situation was spotted past @CameronRitz (via Tom's Hardware).

Okay information technology's all GPUs are Full tech Lmao sheesh
— KillerCam1020🎮 (@CameronRitz) February 10, 2022

Totaltech memberships include more than simply exclusive access to rare tech. They include Geek Team support, "free delivery" (barring the $200 you paid for it), extended return windows, and more. With that said, if you rarely store at Best Buy, $200 is a hefty surcharge for a production type such as a graphics menu.

It'south been a tough time to get GPUs or associated PC applied science at a fair toll just about anywhere, given how the market has redefined the word "fair" as a result of the global chip shortage. Thankfully, NVIDIA and others are confident that the situation, specifically as it pertains to graphics cards, will get better in the second half of 2022.

Updated February 2022

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