Three years ago, Metabo released their 18V 8-port simultaneous battery charger to the tune of $999. A thousand dollars for this charger!
What’s special about this Metabo 18V cordless power tool battery charger is that it can recharge up to 8 batteries all at the same time. It’s essentially 8 chargers in 1.
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The charger launched at $999, and is currently priced at $864. I checked the price at Amazon and had to do a double-take – it’s currently $484*.
(*As of the time of this posting on 10/6/2020.)
Looking at online price trackers, this product has an interesting history, where several times now it has rocketed down from its regular retail price to astounding lows.
We’ve talked about this before, where Amazon will routinely discount tools and other items that aren’t selling well. There might be a steep initial discount, followed by a series of additional discounts. Someone buys the item and the price will then jump back to its original highs.
An undefined time later, and the product will once again start dropping in price, slowly but surely, until an unidentified factor – usually someone buying the item at a steep discount – will reset things.
It seems that’s what’s happening now. I can’t imagine why.
If you’re a heavier Metabo user, is there any price at which you’d buy this pricey 8-bay 18V charger?
Corey Moore
If I were on their platform, I’d buy that in a heartbeat at that price. $999 not so much, likely save towards it or a planned splurge, as I’m a heavy power tool user at work. The 4 port from DeWalt was one the best things I’ve picked up, and this looks amazing for a metabo user.
William Adams
Having worked at an Amazon Warehouse the mechanism seems to me to be:
– items arrive on a pallet and are placed in a warehouse
– items are sold off the pallet
– once the pallet is down to one or two items, if they don’t move, that’s when the discounts begin — Amazon wants to clear the pallet by selling the item(s) rather than having to have an employee pick it and move it into a “Rainbow” aisle which is full of mixed items
– similarly, if a pallet of new items is arriving and the one in the Rainbow aisle still hasn’t sold, it will be offered as a discount so as to make it more palatable to the recipient (there’s a lot of shelfwear associated w/ being in Rainbow aisle)
Big Richard
This is why I keep a lot of higher dollar but low priority items (stuff I want but don’t *need*) on a wish list, and just check them periodically. One day something will drop in price significantly, and often times it is only for a day or so. I recently bought DeWalt’s DCF898B 7/16″ impact wrench for $98.33, while today it is $226.68. Also scored their FlexVolt table saw for about $130 under MSRP a couple years ago.
Stuart
Or shopping cart as “save later.” Amazon has taken away their “sort by lower price” wishlist feature for a while, but in-cart price alerts have never changed.
Jon
This is where tools like “camelcamelcamel.com” come in handy. Register with them, and give them access to one of your wish lists, and you can be notified when the price drops to your defined threshold of interest.
John
What online price tracker(s) do you use? I might start using this as a strategy to get a few things that I need.
Stuart
CamelCamelCamel seems to be the most popular. I don’t use it for tracking, only for checking price history on occasion. It misses a lot of promo types, such as those with clickable coupons or in-cart discounts, but can still be useful as a research tool.
Matt
DealNews.com. You can set email alerts for whole categories, or keyword search on brands or specific products.