How The Shopping Experience Has Changed
The Mall One thing that has really changed since I was a kid is the shopping experience. When I was young, if you wanted to buy something you went to the store and bought it. You didn't bid on it, you didn't run out to other stores to see which one was cheaper since that was impractical and you didn't have coupons or rebates. Stores really had the upper hand in those days, since it was so hard to know if you were getting a good deal or not. There was just no way to compare store prices. About the only thing you had at your disposal was the newspaper. If you saw an add for something that you knew was usually a lot more expensive, you might buy it. That still didn't mean that you got a good deal. I remember when pocket calculators first came out. I am talking about somewhere around the early 1970s. A Bowmar pocket calculator had been announced as being on sale over the store loudspeaker. The year must have been about 1973 or so and the usual price of about $399 had been reduced to $169. The pocket calculator had red lights that showed the totals in sort of the way a digital calculator does today. I couldn't resist the price and bought one thinking that I got some bargain. What I didn't know and had no way of knowing was that LED pocket calculators were just coming out and they were much cheaper. By the end of the 1970s these calculators would drop to below $10.00 and today you can find tons of them in any 99 cent store. If I would have had a computer back then and the Internet had existed, I could have done some research and I would have known that new types of calculators were coming out and saved a lot of money. There has never been a better time for shoppers than now. First of all there are coupons available for a lot of products and also rebates and you can look up what coupons and rebates are available and print the coupons out and even the rebate forms. Some stores have stopped taking coupons that were printed at home, but many still do. I printed a coupon out for a free thumb drive and took it to my local computer supply store and sure enough, they gave me a 4 gig thumb drive for free from Kingston, the memory people. You just never know what you are going to be able to find. Usually though, the coupons are for a certain amount of money off of a particular item or off your entire purchase. I recently received a coupon for 20% off of my total bill at one of the local restaurants that I eat in with my wife. One coupon that I printed was sort of unique. It was for a free desert as a birthday present in a restaurant that I had registered in for rewards.
Sale I have found that even though there are plenty of comparison price shopping services, those are the ones where they show you the price for an item at several different stores, they really are not where the bargains are. One of my sons loves to check Deals Of America to see what buys are listed. He says that he gets plenty of bargains. Deals Of America is a site where they put up the prices of what they believe are exceptional sales at different stores. They list quite a bit of stuff every day. You can get some deals there, but I prefer the method of Googling. Googling is where you type the name of the item you are interested into Google several different times in different ways, such as Cheap Computers, Low Cost Computers, Economy Computers etc. You just never know what might come up. You do have to be careful that you don't try and buy something from a place that might cheat you. The Internet is full of those kinds of places. I usually am very careful about that. I also have a regular group of stores that I would check for the particular item I want. This worked out very well for me recently. I wanted a cheap laptop, not a net book. I managed to find an outstanding buy at Micro Center. I was able to purchase a nice Emachine Laptop for $299. It had been purchased for my wife, but when I saw how nice it was, I also bought one. The quality of the machine surprised me and it had enough power for me to do just about anything that I wanted to on it. Before I go any further, let me say that I am not a games player, so if you are, this may not be the machine for you. Aside from that, the machine is more than powerful for any of the ordinary tasks that an average person might do, such as Internet browsing, word processing, watching movies and such. As a matter of fact, this is hard to believe, but the machine has one of the clearest screens I have ever seen. Another item that I think that I got a great buy on was a new Tomtom GPS. The model I purchased listed for $229 almost everywhere. I did several diligent searches and guess what I found? A place called Car Toys had it for $109. I am not talking about a refurbished unit, I am talking about a new one. Again I owe this bargain to Google.
Shopping On The Internet Sometimes my searches lead me to a brick and motor store such as Micro Center and other times they lead me to an Internet store. The beauty of the Internet store is that sometimes you pay no taxes on your purchase and there are even times where you pay no shipping. When I purchased the GPS I paid neither and made the purchase even sweeter. You just never know who is going to be cheaper on an object. I used to shop at eBay, but have given that up. First of all I hate the auctions and second most eBay stores are not that cheap. I know that some people seem to like the auctions at Craig s List, but as I said I am not an auction person, it is just too much trouble for too little reward. Beware of the auctions that want you to buy credits to use to bid with, it is very easy to buy $150 in credits and land up with nothing. We have a great shopping tool at our fingertips, it is called the Internet and we might as well take advantage of it. |
