Financial Tip Friday:
This Friday, I'm going to be focusing on the issue of personal electronics and where to buy them. Many people, including myself, have resorted to buying these sometimes expensive items online. For a while, this was the smarter decision as many major stores such as Best Buy or Target had trouble adapting to an increasingly online based marketplace and often, their prices were considerably higher than what you could find online. As a result, many people began shopping online and have since never looked back. This effectively drove up revenue from sites like eBay or Amazon. However, it seems as if the big stores are finally adapting.Tip of the Day: Always compare store prices to online prices.
Why do you ask? It has become commonplace for stores like Best Buy and Target to price match their competitors. Previously this was exclusively limited to their other physical competitors, however, it has now morphed into price matching even online prices. Essentially, they realized that many people walking around in store would use their smart phones to compare the price of an object they were looking at and generally, since it was cheaper online, they would opt to just wait a few days for shipping in order to save a few dollars. Given this new policy, customers can now demand to purchase said item at the same price as the site they found on their smart phone, thus saving them time and money. However, just because stores now have this policy, doesn't mean its cheaper to buy items in store than it is online. It still requires you to spend money on gas simply getting to the store and the time it takes to get there is valuable as well (especially if you're travelling in a large group). It seems as though the convenience of online shopping is too great. Unfortunately, this is not always true. Have you ever bought something on eBay and it wasn't as expected and you had to go through their extremely tedious resolution center? Or perhaps have had the USPS lose your item? Both situations occur a bit more often than any online retail site would like to admit and the consumer ends up receiving a gift card from Amazon or something of the sort.
Until you have to return an item.
