How much would you expect to save on a dis­count coupon for a Nikon D800? Maybe $100 or even $200? Those are the amounts I’ve heard rumored that Nikon will drop the price of the D800 at the end of this week. Hey, any amount of sav­ings is a good thing. Now let’s take your imag­i­na­tion a step fur­ther. It doesn’t have to be a Nikon D800 on dis­count. It could be any cam­era. That’s what hap­pened this week­end when Sta­ples released this coupon into the wild. I saw a per­son post an arti­cle from FSTOPPERS about this spe­cial deal. 30% off any camera. It def­i­nitely got my atten­tion. It made me think to myself (which is my favorite way), That’s $900 off the price of a Nikon D800. Not too shabby. If you look at the arti­cle, there are pho­tos of receipts from folks who took advan­tage of this dis­count on a Nikon D800 at Sta­ples. While I already have a D800 refurb on order from Ado­rama, this was a big­ger sav­ings with the reg­u­lar Nikon war­ranty, plus the addi­tional year that AMEX pro­vides when I buy on that card.

The Nikon D800 Dis­count That Wasn’t

If it seems too good to be true, that was the case for me. I started call­ing my local Sta­ples and none of them had this cam­era in stock. Appar­ently, Sta­ples stores in the South­east Region (Florida, Geor­gia, Alabama, etc.) are in “high risk” areas, so they don’t carry DSLR cam­eras. All they have on hand are point & shoot cam­eras. The coupon was good for those cam­eras, but that’s not what I wanted. Then I finally spoke to some­one at a store who said she could apply the coupon as a “sale saver” if I came in to pay for it at the store. She’s order the Nikon D800 and have it by Tues­day. Sounded good to me. That was about 7:30pm and the coupon expired when the store closed at 9:00pm. Once I got there, the story changed a bit. They could not order the cam­era for me and apply it with the dis­count. It wasn’t for a lack of effort on their part, either. It turns out the store man­ager is also a pho­tog­ra­pher, so we had a good chat about gear while I was sob­bing over my lost oppor­tu­nity of a 30% dis­count. Accord­ing to the FSTOPPERS arti­cle and com­ments, some peo­ple were able to go into their local store and order the D800 on a kiosk. Oth­ers, like me, had no such luck. As a mat­ter of con­so­la­tion, the man­ager also had a 20% dis­count coupon that he could apply to an order for the Nikon D800. That worked out to be $100 less than the refurb unit I have on order from Ado­rama. While $100 is a nice amount of money to have in your pocket, I declined. I didn’t think that $100 was worth the has­sle to the folks at Sta­ples, Ado­rama, and myself to basi­cally get the same thing in my hands. If I didn’t have the refurb cam­era on order, I would have jumped all over that dis­count. This dis­count didn’t work out for me, but it worked for a few other folks who found that coupon. Just remem­ber that this is one of the best times of year to score some big sav­ings on big ticket items. I end up buy­ing most of my expen­sive gear in Decem­ber of each year. Shop­ping is a game of oppor­tu­nity and strategy.