Is the Employee Purchase Program really that great?

I mean I know they show the 'web price' and the 'employee price' and often times there is a substantial difference... but sometimes I really question the validity of the discount. Like I'll see one laptop with a web price of $1200 and an employee discount price of $1100, and then I'll see one with a web price of $1800 and an employee discount price of $1200... so then I'm like 'wow... that's a 600 dollar savings, I should go with that one'... but then I look at the specs and there's hardly any difference that would explain the 'web price' $$-difference. Seems like they might put the big 'employee discounts' only on the models that are a horrible deal on the regular website anyway...

What about if I have a business account with them? Are they as or more negotiable than Dell business sales tends to be? Would my negotiated price with Lenovo on an order of one or several Thinkpads tend to be better pricing than the "Employee Price", or about the same on average, or worse?

I know I can't/am not supposed to use the employee discount info for business purchases - only purchases for personal use/myself... and I don't have any intention of abusing that. But just for comparison's sake I have always wondered if I went to Lenovo for some of my purchases if the prices they'd quote me would be better or worse than I tend to see on the employee discount area of the site.

 

The lenovo call center prices cannot match the epp prices.
But the best discounts I've seen are on a very limited selection of models with the education discount purchased via the colleges.

 

By call center you are referring to their business reps?

I know I can typically demolish the "College discount" pricing that Dell gives through my university just by calling my enterprise sales contact at Dell.

Sounds like the same doesn't apply for IBM...

 

It depends on the model. For the most part EPP is pretty good pricing (IIRC 65% of non-sale MSRP), but then there are some deals that are killer, you just have to know the model to look at.

 

So it's cheaper to call them??

 

I'm just curious about the epp. I know that you only get so many purchases a year. Does a laptop count as 1 item or several items like the breakdown when you build one online?

 

You're limited to 25 purchases a year with any given employee serial number. One laptop counts as one purchase.

 

I'm thinking of purchasing a X60s through EPP when Vista comes preinstalled. Does anyone know if you can call Lenovo and customize the laptop even further? The EPP laptops are all pretty much prebuilt.

 

nope, if you get EPP, i'm pretty sure you get the pre-made configurations.

 

Not even the extended battery?

 

You can't customize the pre-configured machines, but you can call up Lenovo and have them make a CTO (customized to order) machine for you. When you do that, you can include whatever components you'd like.

 

i recently was in the same situation of wanting to configure an EPP z61t.

there were some things i COULD change (upgrade RAM, switch versions of Windows, change the HD) and some things that i could NOT change (i could not get the black lid with my configuration, I could not upgrade past the 2GHz Core 2 Duo processor).

Hopefully that helps. I would recommend looking at the tabook and getting the model that is most similar to your's, and then call and see what they can or can't do.

 

Where do I get the tabook?