Care to share your bargain?

I have a woman listing things on eBay for me right now.
I paid $4.99 for this, and $3.99 each for these.

Yesterday at Walmart women’s and kids socks (½ a cart full) were 25¢. I didn’t buy any, but I called a woman friend who has lots of kids and grandkids.

Can you believe I paid $8.99 for this today?

You think that’s too much or too little? Shannon Crystal. Their simpler cake stands sell for $60–80 retail.

I’m not mobile. As in researching an item. I’m not that guy standing in your way researching every item in the store on his phone. Knowledge and guestimate, in equal parts.

My best bargains have all been free from Freecylce.org. Two things stand out are a baby grand piano I got for free from a local church though I did have to pay to have it moved. I also got a free 7½ foot long leather couch that is now in my office and perfect for laying down for a nap.

You @ibstubro can probably appreciate this one, although a lot of folks might not care for it.

I like some of the food at Del Taco (do they have those where you live, or are they only in California?) They have a few things that I like on their dollar menu, and since I am thrifty, I like to choose items from this menu when I eat there. Every time you buy anything at Del Taco, you get a receipt that has a survey on it. If you take the survey, they give you a secret code number that you then write on your receipt, and then you get one dollar off your next purchase of $3 or more. So I always fill out the survey, and I always get 3 items from the dollar menu, and I only pay $2. And for that, I am full and satisfied. They have both iced tea and iced coffee on that dollar menu, and with the iced tea, you can get unlimited refills. I usually drink about 4 cups of iced tea when I’m there, because I love iced tea. It’s one of the few fast food places that has good, freshly brewed, un-sweetened iced tea.

You get the receipt with the survey, each time you buy anything. Even if you only buy one single item, but I always buy 3 items, using the receipt with the code number on it. So I get 3 items, for two dollars, and get a new receipt. I just keep filling out the surveys and getting the dollar off code. Yay me : )

I love those white coffee cups. My grandparents had some that were similar when I was growing up and my brother and I always used those cups to put our Easter egg dye in. It had to be those cups or nothing! I also collect the colored Pyrex dishes. Yay you!

Oh yeah, and I recently bought a stack of these Kashi Margherita Frozen Pizza Individual Sized for 99 cents each at the 99 Cent Only Store. I think they’re usually about $3 at the grocery store. Pretty tasty too.

I got a $3,000—$4,000 pre-owned Chevy Express ⅓ ton van w/5.7 V8 for $500. 

Freecycle.org keeps me in bargains as well. Over the years I have picked up several sets of beds, kitchen tables and chairs, an uncountable number of toys, two refrigerators, one several years ago, still working, and a beautiful double door recent model one last week. I give away much of this furniture to friends and relatives as they move into apartments and such.

I have also given many items to Freecycle, such as computer chairs and desks, an unwanted bedroom set (bookcase headboard, matching dressers and side cabinets), and so on.

You know we have this in common @ibstubro and I think you’ve heard of a few of mine!

Here’s a great one – a large rug in 100% wool for 12 euros. And it matches the decor perfectly

Saucy maid below stairs, pretty, nice tits, hard worker, £10:50 an hour…sorted.

This past week, I’ve been pretty-ing up my house.

I got this bookcase for free on Craigslist to help manage my book collection. I’m down to two stacks of cardboard boxes, now.

I got this futon for $40 in brand new condition, on Craigslist.

I got new paint for my living room off the Oops Rack at Home Depot for $9. Regularly a $37+ can of paint/primer combo. I might do the whole house off the Oops Rack. I love the Oops Rack.

Oh! I got a free rug and a recliner on Craigslist this week, too. Free and free.

Alas, Freecycle isn’t active in my rural area, and the only experience I’ve had with freebee sites around here, the competition has been too fierce. You have to be right on it. Cheap is easier than free around here.

As an auction company, we no longer accept pianos, @Cruiser, but a baby grand is a nice score. We pissed a great leather couch away recently, and still got $200, at that. The woman was thrilled. She looked on-line and it was, like, $5,000 couch!

My favorite meal around here, @Kardamom, is HyVee garlic cheese bread. Basically cheese pizza without the tomato sauce, with garlic butter on top. 75¢ a slice. I get about ¼ a cheese pizza for $1.62 with tax. Parm cheese and marinara dipping sauce free.
I’m leery of the on-line surveys, but you seem to have mastered that!

Sweet!, @Hypocrisy_Central Was the van from a friend, relative or stranger. Extra points if it was a stranger.

I’m envious, @YARNLADY. Both that you get such great free things and that you’re such a generous friend that I can’t have. :-)

Beautiful rug! @Stinley It’s hard to find a rug bargain around my area. I should visit. Did I ever mention that on my one trip to Hawaii I bought so much junk at the Salvation Army that I had to buy another carry-on there, as well? lol

I love the Oops rack, @Seek. Someone has to choose the color, why not the most appealing randomness? They opened a new Goodwill 99¢ a pound bulk store near me last week. It was a bust, but for the stuff I couldn’t haul. Burgundy 4’ metal shelving units, 2 and 4 foot high, $1 a foot. Matching burgundy file cabinets? $1 a drawer. You’da been in organization heaven.
Craig’s list is all but worthless around here. Too rural – too few listings.

Wow you guys! Awesome. To me, shopping, or buying something, is no fun if you don’t get a great deal.

We bought a 1995 Southwind motor home for $10,000. It booked at $14,000.

One of our best buys ever was a 2006 Durango. It was a repo selling for $6,000. It bluebooked at $13,000.

And then there are countless smaller items. I found two of these over the course of 20 years. Paid $10 for one at a thrift store, and $5 for the other at a garage sale. The “value” of them seem to fluctuate wildly, from $12 to $145. At any rate, I’m Dutch and I like them.

On our local buys/sell/trade facebook page, folks were listing almost brand new, front loading washer and dryer for $50. You’d pay hundreds for them in a store. I jumped in line to snag them, but there were, oh, 500 people ahead of me.

^^ Was the van from a friend, relative or stranger. Extra points if it was a stranger.
I did not know them, and bargained them down.

It was a stranger. He was having a garage sale on his farm. So I got the motor home at a garage sale. :D

Well, he started out as a stranger but we quickly realized he was our kind of people. The first time we met I had climbed out of the car into the farm dust in bare feet. The guy, a total stranger then, asked my husband, “Is she from Arkansas?” LOL!

I drive a pretty hard bargain and we had fun bickering and talking trash. He told my husband I was the meanest woman he’d ever met! Yeah, we liked him a lot. The second time we went there, just to hang out, I asked the guy if his damn wolf-dog was a rapist! Man, that dog liked to get UP CLOSE and familiar!

We actually didn’t get it the first time we went. When we were ready, a year later, we just ran by the farm to see if it was still there.

It was a fair deal and in almost perfect condition. The paper work with it said they paid $85,000 for it new.

It has that hideous 80’s color scheme though…mauve and blue. Bleh!

I’ve told my best story here before. Bought a plate at a yard sale for $10 not knowing much about it (didn’t buy if the first time I shopped her sale), and sold it a week-to-the-day later for $6,000. I don’t anticipate being able to duplicate that.

That’s some impressive negotiating, @Hypocrisy_Central! I’m not real good at haggling. I don’t enjoy it like @Dutchess_III seems too. I know a lot of people that live to haggle, and they soon learn to just shoot me their best price because I tend to pay or walk. I lose sales because I give people my best price, and they take that as a starting point. No, I’m done.

@ibstubro I’m with you on haggling. I’d rather pay a higher price than to haggle with someone. It’s not in my nature and actually makes me feel like I might have a panic attack.

A few years ago at the supermarket I saw an entire bin of breakfast cereal on sale for $1.69. Each box had a coupon for $2 off the next box. I pulled out a pocket knife and ripped off all the coupons before I brought them to the cashier. They ended up paying me a few bucks to carry away two shopping carts with cereal.

In Ontario we have something called the Scanning Code of Practice. When UPC scanners were first introduced in the late 70s, people were suspicious. The industry reacted by setting up the Scanning Code of Practice which says, among other things, that if the scanned code charges you the wrong price, you will get the item free up to $5 in value, and up to four items. Most people don’t even know the Scanning Code exists, and stores won’t tell you, but I regularly get all kinds of things free by demanding they follow the Scanning Code of Practice. Smaller mom & pop stores don’t usually know it exists, but the large supermarket and drug store chains do, and will abide by it if you call them on it.

If I see an in-store sign which gives a price which differs from the price in the store’s flyer, I always buy four of it, knowing it’s very likely they’ve forgotten to update their scanning price and I’ll get it free. Some stores even provide a scanner mounted on the wall so you can check prices for yourself, which makes it easy to find stuff they have to give you for free.

A national drug store chain here was bought out by a supermarket chain, so they sold off all their store brand canned goods to replace it with the supermarket’s store brand. My local drug store put up a sign saying all their canned goods were 75 cents, then put a $1 off sticker on everything. I just stuck out my arm and walked, dumping the contents of every shelf into my cart. They ended up paying me something like $60 to carry away all their canned goods, but they had to scan every can and process every sticker individually, which took more than 40 minutes. During a busy Saturday. I was not a popular man.

I never want the other person to regret transacting with me, @Kardamom. I don’t want a “deal” at the cost of hard feelings.

We used to have a grocery chain store in town – National Foods – that would give you the item free, and return your money, if the scanned price was different than the advertised price, @SmashTheState. Nearly every visit I would find a mistake. I’d take the refund home and put it in a designated can.
One month I had $36 in the can. $72 with the groceries I got for free.
Hell yes.
It’s not gaming the system. It’s capitalism!

@ibstubro That is the most awesome story about the plate! Do you have a picture of what it looked like?

Re: haggling. I do like it. Some others do too and they’re fun to “work with.” Other’s don’t. So if they aren’t open to it I either pay what they’re asking, but, more often, I just walk away.

Best haggling story: Stopped at a tiny, hole-in-the-wall antique store we’d never been to before. Most of the stuff was out of my price range (I don’t haggle over stuff I know I can’t win,) but then I spied this globe. It was so cool. It was made out of different types of polished rocks. Each country was it’s own color. The North Pole, for example, is alabaster. He had $75 on it.
I said, “Will you take $50?”
The way he snapped, “No!” told me that was a lost cause…but I really wanted that globe! So I said, “Will you take $100?”
He started to snap “No!” again, then it hit him what I said. He softened and said, “Sure!”
I said, “No. $85.”
He said, “Ok!”
Then I said, ”$75! That’s my final offer! I won’t go any lower!”
He just grinned. I said, “It’s something I had to do you know!”
He said he knew. He owned the shop! He’s no stranger to haggling.
So he started out cranky, but we left him laughing. Rick and I often do.

@Dutchess_III One of the things I do for fun sometimes is anti-panhandle. I’ll get $20 or $30 in random, assorted coins and stand on a streetcorner downtown, asking people as they pass, “Can I give you some change? Ma’am? Please, I’d like to give you some change.”

It’s always hilarious and fun to watch the way most people stare resolutely ahead and glare, pretending I don’t exist. A tiny percentage take one or two steps, stop dead, and then turn and ask me if I said what they thought I said. These people get a handful of change.

My favourite, though, was the college student (I know he was a college student because he was reading the college newspaper as he was walking down the street) who, without looking up from his newspaper, said “sure,” took the money, said “thanks,” and kept on walking without missing a beat or even glancing at me.

This is the plate, @Dutchess_III. Essentially. Mine was green opalescent – the rarest color combination – and that was crucial. The only other one that had sold in the last 10 years brought $10,000. But a bird in hand…

They think giving change is an introduction to a sales pitch, @SmashTheState. “I’ll give you a quarter if you listen until your eye’s glaze over.” Most people don’t have the time to extricate themselves from a situation that gives “Free change”. IMO.
I’d likely stop and engage you in conversation.

No, @ibstubro, they think I’m a bum. Which is the point, and why it’s such a fun exercise. These classist pricks pass panhandlers begging for money to survive every day and have learned to tune them out and make them essentially invisible. They don’t hear me offering them money. All they hear is the word “change” and keep scurrying in their little rat maze for the next morsel of cheese.

A few years ago, Antiques Roadshow did a show on antiques that people owned that were extremely valuable. They had a semi-circular table that a woman picked up at a yard sale for $25. It turned out it was worth something like half a million dollars.

I used to buy a lot of stuff from yard sales and thrift shops and stuff like that. Not so much any more because I just don’t have the space or the need. I got a Motorola tabletop radio, aqua color, for $25 from some shop in Philly once. In the early 90’s, I had a book about Disney collectibles and they showed a Snow White figurine with some mark on the back (maybe it was the year, something in the 1950’s). At that time, this Snow White was valued at $500. I was at a junk place (pure junk like Sanford and Son) and this old guy had all this crap in heaps in his yard. Things were 25 cents and 50 cents and dirt cheap. One thing I picked up for 25 cents was a Snow White figurine. The year was the one in the collectibles book but the bow on top of her head had a little chip in it, which I realize really diminishes the value of the item. I didn’t buy it to sell it, though, so the value of it is really not too important.

I’m always shopping for sales and clearance for things I do want and need, like handbags and jewelry. :)

I got this beer clock for $15.00 at a garage sale a few years back. I have it in my office and had no idea it was valuable until a customer noticed it and said I bet that is worth a lot of money.

I hardly ever pay retail for anything @jca. And I share the wealth.
140 individual bags of chips for $5.99. lol

Very cool clock, @Cruiser. At least your customer didn’t try to beat you out of it.

I LOVE Antiques roadshow! My favorite was a throw that these people had just casually hanging over the back of an easy chair for decades. On a whim they brought it to AR. Turns out it was a “National Treasure,” worth millions!

That is a beautiful plate @ibstubro! To be honest, I might have hesitated in giving $10….except now I wouldn’t. :D

Cool, @Cruiser.

@SmashTheState I would probably ignore you too. If your avatar is a picture of you, you just look like a large, angry man, and standing on the corner handing out change to people who don’t need it would strike me as a strange thing to do. Why don’t you give that $30 or $40 to someone who does need it, like a homeless person?

I shopped her yard sale 3–5 times, @Dutchess_III. Great, cheap, antiques. It was around trip 3 that I bought the plate. In all honesty, I found it offensively gaudy. Zero desire to keep it.

I like plain carbonated water. Here I can get a Route 44 carbonated water at Sonic for under 50¢.

Good catch!

I don’t do carbonated water but I get water for free at every convieneince store.

I recently had a clerk try to charge me 27¢ to fill my own cup with ice, @Dutchess_III. She was so embarrassed by her boss’s decision, she offered to pay the 27¢ herself, out of petty cash. I just left, never to return.

If you can find a carbonated water source, you could always have a little squeeze bottle of flavoring.

I had a convenience store do that to me once. It was out in the country though. I never went there for ice and water again.

I don’t want, or need, flavoring. Just plain water is fine with me. And carbonated water by itself is GAGGGY!! IMO.

I love carbonated water.

I’m IN the country, @Dutchess_III. One town I live near gives nothing for free.
The other gives free stuff all the time.

You can guess. Illinois or Missouri? Union or confederate? Free or pay?

So I worked Bluegrass. I worked in the “Mercantile” area. It’s where we sold the CD’s for the musicians who were playing in the competition.
Got to meet the band Socks in the Frying Pan. They’re Irish. They had ALL the girls swooning! After each set there was a mile long line of giggling girls waiting for autographs.
When they came in to check on their sales they gave me one of their CDs for free, and autographed it. I’m going to give it to my 13 year old daughter.

I wish Tommy Emmanual had been there this year. THAT would have been a serious keeper. He’s amazing.

We got a bargain this weekend. We were at our local car boot sale and are always looking for things we need for the house refurbishment. My husband saw a brand new, never out the box, roof window. £175 new. Got it for £35.

I grabbed a new office chair today at the Goodwill. It’s like a mini-Papasan chair on wheels. It’s a bit tacky with a zebra stripe pattern, but I needed something other than a kitchen chair to sit on at the computer, especially since I’m starting my new work-at-home job soon. It’s comfy. And $11.

We recently picked up a free, two door refrigerator that works just fine (so far) from freecycle.com and I picked up three functioning, sturdy computer chairs from the street on our neighborhood trash pick up day. The only thing wrong with them is the leather is cracked on the seat and arms.

You can make an awesome patch for leather and vinyl chairs using scraps from a vinyl sign company.

@ibstubro Thank you. I already have pleather in my inventory, but I am having trouble finding a glue that will actually stick. I have tried letting it dry for several days, but as soon as they sit on it, it peels up again. The leather on the arms is peeled off down to the fabric, and nothing sticks to it. I am currently using denim fabric tied around the arms.

I got a new three berth tent with the price tag of £70 still on it for £5! I go camping two or three times a year so will get good use out of it

We are in the process of securing a loan for This. Here, Here, here, here.
He agreed to $11,000.

Wow @Dutchess_III that is a beast!

Not compared to the beast we have now! Which I think we can sell for at least $11,000.

My 10 year old grandson used his Tooth Fairy money, $5.00 to buy a chess set at a yard sale today. It was so beautiful, I looked online to see what it originally sold for. We found it on E-Bay for $500.00

I just bought 32 lbs of lye for the cost of 8 lbs the way I was buying it previously.

Is it onyx, @YARNLADY?

@jca No, here is the E-Bay entry.

Just got back from shopping.

I’d taken Ian out to get something to eat. We stopped first at Sam’s Club because I wanted to look at the prices of some things. Instead of going to some pricey place for dinner, I got a polish sausage and a drink at Sam’s and Ian got a pizza and a drink. Total cost: $4.50.

So then we went to Target. I like to walk around there to get ideas for what normal people find aesthetically pleasing. It’s like a tactile Pinterest board.

I’d been looking for baskets made of wood or wicker or something, to display my soaps for sale. Someone saw me looking at the baskets and heard me lamenting to Ian about how much it would cost me to buy enough of those.

“Easter clearance, back corner of the store” she said in a low voice.

BRILLIANT!!

They were marked 90% off. Came home with eight wooden baskets with fugly easter-egg printed liners, at $1.20 apiece. I’ve already removed the handles and taken out the liners. I may see if the liners can be overdyed. Maybe.

Eight baskets for less than the cost of the one I was looking at when the lady tipped me off.

Not all heroes wear capes.

You making a bunch of cat beds @Seek?

Nope, I’m selling soap

Well, my bargain is I had a son who I taught to work hard. All my kids work hard, but my son is there for me at the drop of a hat. It seems he can do anything. He was kind of expensive but his love and devotion have paid me back infinitely more.
Right now he and Rick are pulling up the deck boards and flipping them over. The plan is to have a deck that kind of looks new.

I recently purchased (8) vintage dinner plates at a thrift store for 6.50. Sold them on ebay for 180.00.

@toolatetothegame nice. What kind of plates were they?

@ Stinley TEPCO USA Green Palm leaf. So i find myself looking everywhere for those now.