With the last weekend of the holiday shopping season it seems like every company has multiple flyers advertising last minute sales to entice impulsive shoppers. On top of that, stores are already sending out flyers to advertise post Christmas sales which kind of makes shopping for presents after Christmas sound like a smart thing to do.

In some cases it kind of makes you feel silly as you can clearly see how there will be so many price drops after the holiday as if it’s like you are not disciplined enough to wait one day to save 50%. I usually try to find out the best deals online nowadays first as you can usually find digital versions of store flyers before they even arrive in the mail.

Whenever I see a sale on a flyer I don’t usually focus so much on the price initially but rather from a business perspective that usually tells me that the company often has some kind of vendor promotion to enable them to sell it at such a low price. With that, if I am interested in buying the item in question I would usually ask someone who works in the field to see how good of a deal it really is. Most often in these cases, you can get it for even less.

A lot of these prices that I am seeing are pretty enticing as is though I must say.

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I was just passed this story that revolved around a contestant named Denise Martin that was on the reality TV show Survivor. I actually did watch the finale this past Sunday and she wasn’t the winner. At the end they had interviews with the contestants as usual. Denise mentioned how being on the show has forced her to lose her original job as a lunch lady at a school to being demoted to a role as a janitor.

The producer of the show, Mark Burnett, felt bad about her situation and it was announced that she would be given $50,000 to help her out. Soon after this happened, the school’s superintendent mentioned how none of it was true as she was a full time custodian prior to participating in the show and that her janitor job was actually a promotion with a pay raise.

Initially, the superintendent received a hoard of negative responses from the public on how the school was being a “scrooge” so to speak among other things. Obviously, that created quite a spark. Eventually, Denise Martin admitted that it was a lie. It was basically a fake sob story to get support I guess you can say.

In general, this whole Survivor season seemed to have sprung up topics on how the best liars are the ones that make the money in the world. One thing I definitely learned when it comes to people who lie for money or support is that when someone’s story sounds a bit too dramatic to be real it probably isn’t. As a kid I always saw lying to others for financial gain as like a form of credit. Basically, you are going to have to pay it back somehow down the road and the longer you hold it off for the harsher the penalty will be. So, it’s better to just earn it honestly.

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I was talking to a person before who mentioned that for all his friends and family members, he buys them their gifts after Christmas which they don’t mind. Reason being is that around that time things are usually a lot cheaper due to companies attempting to get rid of its excess inventory that it couldn’t sell during the holiday shopping time. That’s not including all the gift returns that happen as well.

Kind of spoils the fun I think though. At the same time, you probably could save well over 30% by buying it afterwards. Of course, one could always just go with the gift card route too.

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Today I was looking at my phone bill and was surprised to see that the invoice amount was higher than usual. Upon investigating it, a lot of the local calls appeared to be registering as long distance calls for some reason.

I did immediately phone the provider to wonder what was happening and apparently it was a network wide problem as almost all of its clients were being charged for long distance calls due to a machine error of some sort. That’s going to be one big mess to clean up that’s for sure.

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I was just reading this list published by Fortune that consisted of what they thought was the dumbest business moments this year. You can see the full list at the fortune site.

The top one was the toy recall for items made in China and it had events that I was aware of such as that 65 million dollar missing pants lawsuit and the dog that inherited millions of dollars. There were quite a bit of stories that I never heard of though which definitely caught my attention. Number 51 was pretty funny where a customer writes a letter to Apple with suggestions on how to improve the Apple ipod and in return she gets a letter from its legal department telling her to stop sending in suggestions.

The 70th one was interesting where in an effort to cut costs to be more profitable, the company Circuit City decided to execute a plan where any sales associate who was being paid “51 cents or more above the established pay range” would be fired. Makes you wonder if that should have been “board of directors” instead of “sales associates”.

Like they say, you live and learn.

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