I read a good point today on how there was a company advertising that it was holding a liquidation sale where the funny thing was the store was carrying items that it normally didn’t sell. Therefore, the point was brought up that the company was just trying to squeeze every dollar they can out of people as they specifically purchased these products in hopes that uneducated shoppers would buy it during the sales frenzy.

This was very true I thought. Even for things such as clearance sales, while you may think they are simply trying to clear out old inventory a lot of companies do just use the buzz word in hopes to sell high margin items to make more money out of people. The best thing you can do is always research the prices of the items at other stores regardless if they say the item is say 60% off. I think a good example too are those Zellers stores that are closing down here as a lot of the items that they claim are like 80% off can be found cheaper at others stores.

Not too recently as many of you know Blockbuster here decided to close its doors while having a clearance sale to get rid of its inventory. Now it seems that Rogers plus stores are doing the same for its games, movies and some phone products. What is interesting to me is the timing as it is the busy Christmas season and I thought they would at least hold out till the holidays was over to capitalize on the busy year and then hold the clearance sale afterwards.

I guess they just really wanted to exit out of the business as fast as possible and wanted a fresh start right during the new years. If anything, I guess for all the shoppers tats a another way to find some really cheap deals for gifts and what not.

Today is the first day of the clearance/liquidation sales of the remaining Blockbuster stores here in Canada and as mentioned in a previous post I thought it would be interesting to pay a visit to a store that was nearby and see what it would be like. As expected, there were signs plastered everywhere telling people that it was a clearance sale and that everything must go.

Traffic wise the store didn’t seem to be very busy at all and the first reason that popped in my mind was that the sales were about 15% to 25% off which isn’t exactly a huge number to get people to have say a camping out frenzy such as a boxing day or black Friday sale. Then again, I did arrive in the early afternoon so maybe all the hoarders came and went already.

For many things the prices didn’t impress me too much. For example, in the game section you can see that this Wii Sport resort game is tagged at about $59.99 and it didn’t even look new to me. Even with a 15% off assuming it was new I can find it at a lot of places for about $49.99.

I guess the most popular sections that people immediately look at are the new release sections as that appeared to have the most empty shelves.

Maybe it’s just me, but one thing I did find confusing about the pricing was that while there were a ton of signs telling you that everything is 15% to 25% off, many times I just found myself confused at what the price was for the item to do the calculation on. For example, like in this kids section you see that it says 25% off DVD’s that normally regular for about $6.99 to $16.99. But with that in mind there didn’t appear to be anything to indicate what the actual prices were for the items on the shelf.

It was kind of the same story for many other items like the video games. Like for this it says 15% off games with regular prices ranging from $12.98 to $54.99 but there isn’t any price on the games to tell you what the price is in the first. I can imagine the company losing a lot of sales that way.

Some items did have tags though which leads me to believe that there is simply a bit too much stock to tag which was overwhelming for the employees.

The cheapest price for any item I was able to find was that they were selling discs from TV box sets individually. Like in this example I saw that they were selling this one disc from season five of the show 24 for about $2.16.

I then remembered that blockbuster also sold junkfood such as chips and so I thought it would be interesting to see if even the prices on those were extremely cheaper than everywhere else or not. For the most part, I would say no as even all these bag of chips were still tagged at $3.99. Even at 25% off you can find it for less at most large supermarkets.

In the store I also saw that Wind Mobile had a kiosk presence in the store. That just made me wonder how the closing of Blockbuster stores will affect Wind mobile as I am assuming they had a partnership to put their kiosks in their locations. That must be a big loss for the company.

Overall, I would say at this point the main selling factor is if you are afraid that if you don’t buy it now someone else will. But for myself, since I technically don’t need anything then the sale has to be extremely cheap for me to get even semi impulsive. There were quite a few brand new items as well and if you can wait and want to risk it a bit I’m sure the sale price will be even lower as the month ends. I might even pay a visit again once they announce say a 70% off sale as I can easily see many things being good birthday and Christmas gifts.

Surprisingly a lady was telling me today that she is going to avoid all of her Christmas shopping until the very last minute. My immediate reaction was that by doing that all the good deals must be gone and not to mention that you will have to fight the crowds.

Apparently from her experience she is usually able to get the best deals at the end because many companies actually have Christmas clearance sales at the last day before the holiday since most stores close down on Christmas day and want to get rid of stuff for the days or so that they missed in sales. While I can easily see this happening for perishable items, it must be hard for gifts like clothes or toys.

Although, one thing that did make sense on why it worked for her is that when she buys gifts she buys based on what she sees is available in-front of her and determining if anything would be suitable for certain people. So of course this won’t work too well if you are trying to buy someone items that are in demand. But in general you have to be one savvy shopper to accomplish this.

I saw this product today that was selling for about $50 where the regular price is about $100. Aftewards I saw another place offer the same product for about $45. This pattern immediately told me that companies are looking to dump the older models of the product in order to make room for other stuff. Usually if you wait it out long enough and it doesn’t sell it can get extremely cheap.

One way at how I distinguish on whether this is just say a weekly special is that I would actively research if there is indeed a newer model of the item coming out. If the product is recent and there isn’t anything coming in the near future that is a good sign that it is just a sale of the week. You can usually find out pretty easily by going to the manufacturer’s site to find out if anything is coming at as well.

While most people look for new products this way for the sake of wanting something recent, this is a good way to see what is going to be cheap as well.