How to Use the Prepared List!
After just a few trips to the store, your list becomes a functioning piece of consumer shopping intelligence. Every time you go to the store, you have more information about prices. This creates a continually updating and improving price list. You took a big step forward to protect yourself against cross selling by creating and sticking to the list.
Now you have the greater advantage by having a price history in your list. You can instantly recognize when prices go up or down. You will now know be able to recognize a good deal when you see it and have the certainty of fact to know it for a good deal.
Tips for using this to best advantage:
1. When you see a good price for something on your list, buy it.
2. If the price is wrong and the item is on your list, consider buying it at a later time, when the prices might come down, or buy it and note the price and be prepared.
3. Build into your lists the option to buy bulk on certain items. Mark each of the items that you would not mind stocking up on if you find a good price. When you see that good price on those items, then buy a lot of it. Many retailers move their prices around on different products. The prices go up and down, knowing a good price from a bad price and being prepared to take advantage of lows will save you even more over the long term.
4. If you go to a non-preferred store, and see a better deal, buy it. But also note the price and the store. Over time, you might determine trends that will enable you to stock up on certain items from once source and other items from other sources.
5. There are many PDA’s and smart phones that can run simple software list programs to help you manage all of this activity and keep all your lists for all of your stores with all of the prices in one place. On your phone you are more likely to be prepared to update your list, and use your list!
6. New bar scanning tools are on the horizon and can turn your phone into a scanner. In the near future, you will not have to write the products nor the prices, just scan it and your phone will become a pricing database to help you find and use the absolute best price when and wherever you happen to be.
Wrapping up the Shopping Maximization Section
In this most recent series of articles we have covered the benefits of shopping with a list and detailed the advanced techniques and strategies you can employee to save money and recognize truly good spontaneous deals. In our final series on controlling Cash Flows we will cover the concept of recycling and re-using or utilizing our extra stuff to get extra mileage out of our past purchases. Afterall it does no one any good to save money at the store only to throw it away once they get it home. We look forward to sharing more on this strategy in the next article.
