Feb 16th, 2008
Hunting for Discounts Part II: Comparisons, Comparisons
In the first installment of Hunting for Discounts, I discussed my love of mail order shopping and comparison shopping and using the Internet to combine the two. In this second installment, I’ll take a look at a real world example.
One of the things I need to purchase every year are bicycle tubes. I typically go through about 10 of these a year, so it’s worthwhile to buy them in bulk or on sale. The local bicycle store I use has standard issue tubes for $3.98 apiece; add tax and I end up at $4.17 for a single tube; for a set of ten we’re talking $41.68. If I purchase a 10 pack of equivalent tubes from Performance Bicycle online, they’ll go for $24.99; add on $7.25 for shipping and we’re at $32.24, about $3.22 per tube. We’re already at almost 23% less without looking for any further discounts, and even if the local place is running their occasional 20% off special on tubes, I’m still spending less via mail order.
If 10 tubes is cheap, would 20 be cheaper? It really depends on what the shipping ends up being. In this example, $49.98 for 20 tubes plus $8.75 for shipping makes for a total of $58.73; that comes out to $2.94 per tube.
It’s possible ordering more tubes would result in additional per tube price reductions, but having more than 20 tubes here would probably result in them being lost or possibly even starting to go bad (rubber does not last forever), pointing to the possibility of waste, which is the true archenemy of frugality. So I believe that in the next few days, it’ll be time for me to order enough tubes for probably the next two years.
How thoroughly do you compare prices when you shop?
