A love letter to Micro Center

Dear Micro Center,

We built a browser extension that remembers what your prices were. It is called Jackdaw, nobody asked us for it, and as far as we know you have never heard of it. So before it goes any further, here is what it is and why we made it.

It started with a question we kept asking in your aisles: is this a good price, or does it only look like one today? Standing in front of a shelf tag there is no way to tell. Jackdaw answers from what shoppers have already seen, on the page where the question gets asked.

We should be plain about the affection, because it is why any of this exists. Almost every retailer of your kind is gone. You kept the stores — the shelves someone can walk along, the parts they can pick up, the open-box rack where a returned card is priced by a person who looked at it, and staff who will talk a customer out of the expensive option, which costs you a sale and buys you a decade. People drive three hours to visit and call it a day out. That is not a distribution channel. It is a place.

We are not affiliated with you and we do not pretend to be. We say so on every page, we use none of your marks, and we have asked you for nothing. If a shopper mistakes Jackdaw for something of yours, we have failed.

Here is where we stop. The extension reads the page a shopper already opened, and nothing else: it never opens one itself, never follows a link, never requests a second page, and never touches the path your robots.txt sets aside. It keeps no images. It records a product, a price, a store and a time — not the search that led there, not the filters, not the URL. There are no ads, no affiliate links and no paid placement, and there is nothing in it to buy. It is open source, so none of that has to be taken on our word.

If any of this is wrong, or unwelcome, or would be better done another way, we would rather hear it from you than guess.