The Raiders of the Lost Walmart are a bold group of retail archaeologists who comb the big-box stores of the world for whatever the exact opposite of treasure is. They find obsolete technology available at prices so high that it deeply confuses savvy shoppers. While knocking $20 off the price of a 4-year-old blender and putting it in the “clearance” section is a decent strategy to move some housewares, it works less well for external hard drives.

Actually, the products that Raider Doug found on a recent trip to Walmart are even older than that. The Seagate hard drive in the middle, for example, hit the market in 2004. Does it work fine to store data? Sure, probably. Can you buy a lot more storage for significantly less money in places other than the clearance shelf of Walmart’s electronics department? Definitely.

Photoshop Elements 6 isn’t as old, having been released only in 2007, but Adobe is now on version 13. Sure, it could be useful for people with older computers, but that’s a limited market.

The VHS to DVD converter kit is a little more complex. That kit may have been on the Walmart shelves for a while, but the product is a current one. “You can buy a cheap usb capture device for roughly $10, install the included drivers, scrap the packaged software(usually Ulead), and use Windows Movie Maker,” notes Doug. The additional $55 is apparently a tax on people who don’t know that, or who want to make the process more complex.

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