by Kendra Fuentes

Wal-Mart is always booming around the holiday season… It promotes offering the lowest prices around and, in return, attracts buyers to its sales and large stock of Christmas gifts.

Upon taking an investigative trip to Wal-Mart and researching gift prices, The Blue and Gold found that their prices are not so great. In fact, most of the large brand-name items were not any less than you would pay for them in department stores.

While in Wal-Mart, The Blue and Gold chose to look for gifts that one would get for loved ones around the holidays. The results of sales and price changes depend on the items.

Is some odd number of cents off of the original price considered a sale to you? Wal-Mart considers it an “Unbeatable” sale. While walking around, you would see big signs with “unbeatable” or “rollback”, only to see less than a dollar taken off from the original price.

There were some items that didn’t even have the original prices on them. In the DVD section, all new DVDs were nineteen dollars, a price you would see in a normal electronics store. Only the extremely old ones were low priced.

“I am Legend” was thirteen dollars, a movie which has been out for quite some time now. If you are looking for a new DVD such as “Hancock”, you can expect to pay the same price everyone else would.

When The Blue and Gold compared Ipod dock prices, a popular gift this season, the prices were very spread out. The no-name brands, such as ihome were seventy dollars. The docks that were brand names that you would find in specialty electronic stores, such a Phillips, were normal prices reaching as high as one hundred and twenty-four dollars.

In addition to electronics, The Blue and Gold looked at jewelry section, a popular place for the men around Christmas time. The Blue and Gold found the same situation that occurred in electronics.

There was some jewelry on sale, but nowhere on it did it say “genuine” or “sterling”. The jewelry that did have “10k gold” or “sterling silver” was priced from forty dollars to over one hundred dollars.

When The Blue and Gold explored Wal-Mart, we did find some good steals. All the bath products were at very good prices. The Blue and Gold would find a set that included the bath gel, lotion, loofa, and bath salts, which was only ten dollars. In a specialty grooming products store, you could only buy one of those items for that price.

Though Wal-Mart is not necessarily the “blowout” it calls itself, it has some deals on no-name items that one would not be able to find elsewhere.