The constant battle to remind my partner that savings are only savings if you would buy the item regardless
this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2024
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“I bought all this shit. Look how much I saved!”
Is a joke my partner and I share anytime we make purchases that are more want than necessity. Keeps us grounded. We know we would have been fine without the thing most likely and buying it had a real price other than just the $ amount.
I came here to post almost exactly this same sentence.
If you shop blackfriday for Xmas and such;
Check out the extension camelcamelcamel https://camelcamelcamel.com/
It tracks prices on Amazon (or if you don't want extension, you can paste the link on their site). The extensions makes easy to check as your shopping.
This let's you check if 50% off is really a sale or "we tripled the price last month and are fucking you over"
You can also setup price watches, and get email when something's price drops below whatever you set.
(Someone else mentioned Keepa that does the same thing, I've never heard of it, but a quick look shows it has a subscription for some stuff, no thanks)
Keepa's price tracker is free and actually shows a lot of useful info embedded into Amazon product pages, like the price history for used, warehouse deals, lightning deals, refurbished, etc.
Remember, if you got an item for $70 instead of the $100 regular price, you didn’t save $30, you spent $70. That’s what I tell myself when I see discounts on stuff that aren’t immediate needs.
I take your point, and you're absolutely correct in that if you'd have never spent that $100 on whatever whizzy gadget you're looking at then you didn't save a penny no matter how good the sale is.
However, life is more than mere survival. If I were to buy something that I was going to get anyway then that's money saved even if it's not an immediate need. The caveat being that I hate "lightning deals" and other short time sales (damn you Musician's Friend and your Stupid Deal of the Day) because in the past I spent a lot of money that I didn't have trying to get a deal on something that I didn't take the time to properly research and wouldn't ever use.
Furthering the idea that 'life is more than mere survival', I want to add that choosing to buy or not buy an item affects more than just you.
When you buy a $70 item from Amazon on sale, yes, you've spent $70 and not 'saved' anything at all. But even if it was a good price, you should consider the added cost is that you gave your $70 to the evil empire. Amazon got your money, and you got your trinket. Surely it would be better if you spent the $70 somewhere else. Give it to someone that you like more than Jeff Bezos. I'm sure you can think of someone like that. You probably won't be able to buy that exact same trinket for $70, but surely you'll get something else you want - and you can actually help someone else at the same time rather than entrenching the power of exploitation.
And sometimes you can choose not to buy something that really will improve your life until you see it on sale. Maybe you don't need it, but it's more affordable now, so you go ahead and buy it and it makes your life better.
also, fuck amazon, go to thrift stores (but not this time of year, they'll be picked clean)-- i got a brand new toaster oven/air fryer and a mini fridge for $25 each
you just have to keep checking back
also, if you're in a college town, check their bulletin boards towards the end of the semester--college kids move out of their dorms and give away all kinds of shit
Thrift stores are kinda fake now. Especially goodwill. Not much in terms of deals nowadays, everything is just barely under retail. It's worse now that people are going around buying and reselling products. Hard to find stuff when you're competing with people who do it as a business.
Craigslist is pretty dog now too. Last thing I got from Craigslist was around 2018, there's never really anything actually worthwhile now. Don't really know what's up with that, but unfortunate I guess.
As much as I despise facebook, facebook marketplace is still the best for secondhand, along with college buy or sell groups. It comes with its own issues (esp if you are selling) but you actually get secondhand prices for most of everything.
The dumpsters are a gold mine at move out too!
I was one of those college kids. Only so much fit in the trailer! I hoped some people were getting a good deal on it.
Remember Friday is Buy Nothing Day!
But what if I run out of weed?
Your friend shall share his
Do dealers have sales?
Dispensaries do. My regular one is having a bigger sale today than Friday though.
Nice!
Use keepa.com and learn how they take us for absolute fools. Their new trick to circumvent the recent law in Europe that forces them to show the average price from the previous 30days, is to have a "tickbox coupon" on many items (only visible from the item page) that takes out a discount, and obviously is not counted in the average "list" price. Magically all those tickbox discounts disappear on black friday.
I remember the good ol days when black friday was actually a single day event, and cyber monday actually had real deals and not faked 30% off 60% markup.
I have to remind myself to buy things I need before November because then they bump the prices and they don't go back down until February.
1 TB 970 Evo SSD selling for $140+ on major retailers right now, even though I bought one a while back for $40 (and even that was lucky because they inflated to $80 anyway).
Also rip Newegg
I'll be damned, a PC part that's cheaper in Europe than the us? first for everything I suppose. it's 95 euro here, including VAT
I love to put all the things I want in my cart and leave them there. Then remove them.
You're just making it hard for the worker:
I’ve saved thousands so far.
I didn't buy a yacht today. What did you not buy? I need inspirations for tomorrow
Dozens and dozens of retro handhelds, single-board computers, mini PCs, and mini laptops.
Amateurs. I didn't buy Twitter.
I'm not buying anything already, right now. 😎
no way. does this actually work?
Yeah, you can net insane savings if you just don't buy things.
whoa….
You won't believe this one weird trick that makes gen-z buy latte's again.
This is the first year I've ever spent any real money on Black Friday. I bought HexOS lifetime, a couple games, and a monitor that was actually price dropped. Though the monitor was a impulse buy due to a friend raving about it
The dark gods are want us to unleash our inner demons by shopping hard!