Need a deal? Just ask!

Published April 19th, 2009

A couple of months ago, I wrote about how frugality has gone mainstream. I think this is a good thing. Since my frugal days started many years ago in university, I’ve managed to find ways to have a rich, fulfilling life while getting the most out of the money that I have available to me. It’s involved being creative, but also it’s meant having to ask for help from the employees at the stores and vendors where I spend my hard-earned after-tax dollars.

Over the last couple of months, many of you have been following the series on my 25% grocery savings rule. Part of the system involved buying what’s on sale and combining it with what you already have to make a meal plan for that week. Getting the the grocery store early does help to secure these deals, but people like myself who have 12 hour day with their commute may not get in there the same day the flyer comes out. I have a couple of ways to get around this: 1) Call ahead to ask the staff when the store gets re-stocked or new shipments come in over the weekend, and plan to visit the store then, or 2) If you don’t see the sale item you’re looking for where you think it should be, don’t waste further time, just ask an employee from that department. They can help you by either getting you the item from the back of the store, directing you to a sale display elsewhere in the store, giving you a rain check, or telling you exactly when they’ll be getting more of that item. If you hadn’t asked, you wouldn’t know, and would have left empty-handed.

If you see an item you know you need, but it’s not urgent, you can always ask the staff if it’s going on sale anytime soon. You’d be surprised at the answer you might get sometimes! Every spring our local farm store puts top soil, manure, and mulch on sale at deep discount, the first year I was lucky enough to see the flyer and get the good deal. The following year, I started to keep an eye on the flyer in the spring, but wasn’t when/if the sale would happen. I just asked one of the landscaping department staff and they told me on would be on sale two weeks from then–problem solved. I had time to decide how much I needed and then bought the whole season’s worth of materials at once. It would have cost me 35% more to just go out and buy everything otherwise–pretty good savings for a couple of minutes of research! As an alternative, some of the larger stores do have a pricing guarantee that if it goes on sale after you buy it they’ll credit you the difference, but that’s a huge pain, and consumer behavior dictates that most of us wouldn’t go back with our receipt to get that adjustment.

Last but not least, whether it’s a department store or a furniture store. It can’t hurt to ask if they can do better on the price–even if it’s already on sale. For example, we still needed to fill the gap under the counter with a matching stainless and black built in-dishwasher to make our kitchen complete. I’ve been eyeing the price of these for a couple of years, and a the basic model from a good brand we’re looking at retails for about $500, and goes on sale periodically for a little over $400. Given the current economy, the sales have been getting better, and I saw it on sale at a furniture store for $358. Not bad! We just happened to be walking through a local department store yesterday and saw the same model, with the last one, the floor model, being on sale for $343. I know it’s obviously never been used, so no mechanical concerns, but it is a little smudgy, and there’s a small scratch in the black plastic panel at the top from all of the customer touching it. We asked the sales person if they could do better on the price? He starts to say that it’s already on sale… and then we say, okay, we thought we’d just ask, point out the scratch, and said very politely that we’d have been happy to pay $300, and we’d buy it right then and there…and slowly turned to walk away. Then we heard “wait…because it’s a floor model…I might be authorized to do better on the price”. He whipped out his calculator, punched away for a few seconds and gave us an additional 10%. End result? We walked away with it for $309!

So the moral of these stories is that if you don’t ask, you can’t get the deals, and it doesn’t even have to involve haggling. By being polite, and just asking the store employees for help, you can save a significant amount of money on things you were already going to buy anyway. If you want to learn more about how to negotiate, specially on big purchases, read my post on 5 things you never thought were negotiable. Happy saving!

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