You're right, Dream, I did forget to factor in the fact that it costs MAS money to actually buy the products they sell.
[rant] Still, if I understand correctly, Super Novas/HGAs are made largely with relatively inexpensive parts. I'm not sure how the actual RGB -> NTSC converter itself is made though, so I could be mistaken.
Regardless, they do put the things together themselves, which does drive down costs. (I know nobody said anything to the contrary.) For instance, hypothetically if EB had a box of parts to make a PS2, that would be cheaper than buying them already assembled from Sony.
Anyway, I doubt it costs these places $200 (including labor) to build an HGA/Super Nova, so I bet they're making more than $100 from each sale. I also bought Metal Slug X and an MVS with my HGA, so that was even more money that MAS could have had.
Even if MAS was swamped with orders, it's still good business to reply to your email. I'd be happier even if I got some canned response such as, "We're sorry for any delays, but we are really busy right now. We'll get to your order as soon as possible." At least I'd be more assured that they'd care about having me as a customer.
Sending out such an email to each customer they couldn't get to right away would take maybe 2 minutes at most, including the time they took to read the customer's email and send out the reply.
Since I never got a reply, I'm still concluding that they weren't interested in my money. [/rant]
I'm not really as upset over this as I probably sound, especially since Great Western was more than happy to take my money.
(And I'm at work right now with nothing better to do.
)
I just don't want to have to bend over backwards to give a company my money.