Plenty pine to pocket iPod for pennies

While the iPod Nano can be somewhat hard to find at any price, one store is selling the device for 99 cents--at least a couple of them.

99-Cent Only Stores plans to sell nine Nanos for 99 cents when it opens its latest outlet on Thursday in La Quinta, Calif., near Palm Springs.

While the iPod giveaway is fairly recent, the publicly traded discount chain has long marked new location openings by allowing the first few customers to buy something quite valuable for 99 cents.

"We used to have 19-inch TVs, either Sharp or Panasonic," said company spokesman Albert Lee. But in recent months, the company has shifted to iPods. "Just to be sort of topical we started doing it with the iPod Nano," Lee said. "It will pull in a different group of people as well."

Now, one should not just show up a few minutes before opening time to get one of these 99-cent iPods. Lee said that people started showing up days ahead of the two prior store openings in which iPods were being given away.

"The lines were just tremendous," Lee said.