Thursday, July 15, 2010

Shopping till they give

Bev and I went shopping with some dear friends in Denver yesterday. I am still trying to figure it out. Bev and I are hunters. We go kill the item, bag it then move on. Our friends on the other hand are shooooooppers. They study, analyse then reap. They were amazing!

I needed to get some new running shoes so we went to a department store that has a good selection and after looking at shoes and not making sense of which shoe had which advantages and which were for serious runners and which were not, I asked my friend Tom* for some help.

Tom is one of those people who knows someone everywhere. Turns out that he knows the manager of the shoe department. So Manager Don* takes me on a step by step run down on running shoes. After trying on several pairs and taking them on extended test runs through the store I finally select a pair. I had been test running for the previous hour and it was nice to finally sit down and make a choice. The shoes were good and the price was great(33% off) but then Tom's wife Louise* speaks up.

She is one of the sweetest people I know but when it comes to deal making she takes no prisoners. She told me to have the store hold the shoes until Wednesday. "Why?" I naively asked. "Because Wednesdays I get 30% off whatever I buy!" she replies. Sounds good to me so we have the store hold them. We then go to the checkout line for Tom to pay for a pair of pants but he doesn't pay anything because Louise has coupons. She somehow gets the trousers for free.

Next day they come back over with the shoes and it turns out she had coupons that got them for free as well. She then said that she thought I should get a second pair of shoes since I can't get them in Uganda and the first pair will likely wear out before we come home again. Sounds good to me so back we went. This time she has a combination of coupons that are so powerful that the store actually pays her $4.00 to take the shoes. I believe they also offered her a cash register and two sales associates if she left before the consumer price index fell any further.

I still don't know how she did it but apparently I have a lot to learn about shooooooopping!

* Names have been changed to protect the thrifty...

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