Raiders Of The Lost Walmart Find MP3 Player That Users Hated Back In 2012

The Raiders of the Lost Walmart are a brave band of explorers who comb the nation’s big box stores for comically outdated, yet still overpriced, merchandise. This is mostly electronics, since they don’t age very well, and today we have two not-so-fine selections from Walmart and from Kmart.

Sean writes that he enjoys combing the clearance section at Walmart to look for comically overpriced items, but had never seen anything wacky enough to submit until last week. He spotted this device on the clearance shelf at his local Walmart.

catch-acall

The thing is, this device is still useful for some people: the state of rural broadband is such that there are still a lot of people using dialup. It’s not a relic of the ’90s, like people in more densely populated areas think it is.

The note on the package that the device is compatible with phone service via cable is interesting, too, since the current heavy marketing of “triple play” packages means that if someone has phone service from their cable provider, they have broadband. Still, they might need to use some kind of legacy dialup system.

This photo that Michael took at Kmart wouldn’t have been too unusual four or five years ago, but a 5-year-old device at full price looks rather odd now.

trio

Amazon still has it available for $27.99, but with a string of one-star reviews declaring it to be “absolute garbage” and “dollar store junk.” Good luck unloading it, Kmart.

Meanwhile, it isn’t often that you get the chance to buy one of PCWorld’s best tech products of 2006.

pcworld2006

Yes, it’s the Vonage V-Phone, yet another product that not everyone liked when it was new, let alone now that its age is in the double digits. You can get it for ten bucks from Amazon.

vonage

As far as we can tell, this device will still work, as long as you have a Vonage account and a computer running Windows 2000 or XP. “There are compatibility issues with the V-Phone and the Microsoft Windows Vista OS,” a support document notes, but you could just not buy a decade-old device for almost the original list price instead.

Want more consumer news? Visit our parent organization, Consumer Reports, for the latest on scams, recalls, and other consumer issues.