Studio711.com – Ben Martens

There's rumor going around about a camping trip for the weekend of October 8 so I figured I should buy a tent. I did some shopping around and found one I liked at LLBean but it wasn't cheap. I decided to head over to SportsAuthority to see what they had and boy was I surprised. They had a Coleman 12'x7' tent for $50. This was normally a $100 tent (I have seen it listed online for as much as $200.) I decided to go ahead and buy it. When I got up to the register, I found out they were having a 30% off sale on most of their tents so the final price was $35. Not too shabby considering I had been looking at a $160 tent from LLBean.

On Saturday, I set it up at home to make sure all the parts were there before I trecked off into the wild. One of the poles was broken so yesterday I took it back to the store. I asked them if I could just exchange the pole because I didn't want to try to cram that whole tent back into the box it came in. Apparently the guy decided it was too much work to undo the bag that the poles came in so he just gave me the whole bag. They didn't take my name. They didn't look at my receipt. They just gave me a complete new set of poles when I showed them one broken pole.

I don't know how these people stay in business, but if you ever need any sporting equipment, their prices are hard to beat. And if you just stand there long enough, they'll probably just start handing you free stuff to take from the store.