I was reading a post about an item that seemed to be a price error where a product that could easily be in the $500 range was selling for $50. Basically, it’s like someone forgot to add an extra zero at the end of the price. Of course there were people that insisted in trying to buy say five quantities of it since it is such a good deal. This usually results in people getting blasted for trying to horde the items.

For me I would usually only buy multiple quantities if I know that I would be giving it to someone else that wants one too or if I can realistically sell the product to someone else to simply make my money back where it is as if I am getting the item for free. Example, if the item is normally $500 and is selling for $50 then I would simply buy two of them where it’s not farfetched to sell the extra one for $100.

I usually find that as a perfect balance where it’s not like you are trying to get everything for yourself but rather you are trying to be smart about saving and making money. I would personally only buy a ton and sell them for a high price if I was specifically in that type of business when it comes to earning an income. At the same time a habit of buying more than you need can usually end up as a waste.

To me it’s more of a habit development where you always want to think of ways to at least break even whenever money is going out of your account. Again, I personally see the real savings when it comes to shopping is how much money you have left in the savings account and not how much you necessarily saved on the item.

When I first read this book my expectation was that there would be a lot of tough love advice where the author tries to tell you the unpopular things you need to do in a business to be financially successful. Example, items like how you have to sacrifice a lot of personal activities and not trusting people.

While the book did have a lot of points like these, there are a lot of moments where Cloutier’s advice seems so vastly different and controversial that it definitely caught my attention. For example, saying how you shouldn’t pay your vendors on time is still a bit of a shocker to me. In some funny ways though I was actually expecting more of that as all of the edification and hype literature about this book kept emphasizing how it was supposed to be very hard-hitting.

The book does focus mainly on ways to help turn a business around and so you can expect to read a lot of doom and gloom stories with ways to get you out of that cycle. It’s definitely not the happy go lucky approach that a lot of other books use.

I personally don’t think that most the advice is too significant for people who run a small business where the operation revolves around say just yourself. I say this because there is a lot of preaching about employees and how you should deal with them in terms of pay and discipline. Nowadays a solo operation business is probably more common such as people having their own online auction business or say people who make tens of thousands through affiliate marketing.

But if you are a business that does millions in sales with a traditional company type of setup a lot of the advice seems perfectly sensible. For example, putting people on a pay for performance plan makes sense as opposed to just paying people to show up and not worry about results. Especially if your business is unprofitable for whatever reason this type of advice seems like the smart thing to do.

Is this book useful for people who are not like a large corporation? It is, but at the same time I would have to say there are probably better books out there if you are a solo or dual team operation. Like most business type of books the key emphasis is your mentality when it comes to money and how you do things.

The impression I walked away with after reading this book is that it serves people best who are in that “bankruptcy” type of scenario. This will help to give you that kick in the butt and slap to the face to make you do what is necessary to turn things around. Basically, focus on your profits and do what is necessary to improve that.

Recently I learned that a person I know actually got extremely lucky and was able to purchase about four tickets to the Vancouver Olympics 2010 Hockey game legitimately through the draws. It is actually for the gold game too to make it even more valuable.

He then made a point that he is going to just sell them as he doesn’t really want to see the game that bad. For what he can probably sell it for too, it was a little too hard for him to resist he mentioned. I’ve seen this happen many of times for hot items too.

For example, I’ve seen people ho lined up for hours buying this hot new release item. As they are about to head home with it, someone comes by and is willing to pay like 5 times the amount of the retail price for the item and so the person thinks that the offer is too silly not to accept.

That is something to think about if you are looking to make some extra money where if there are items that you don’t care too much about, researching about how much others would be willing to pay for it is not a bad idea at all.

There was this fitness business I was looking at that dealt with teaching people a specific sport and like most places they offered a pricing package. Interesting thing I noticed though that throughout its site they were actually pushing some kind of diet product as part of their curriculum fee. I recognized this product from all those Internet advertisements too.

These types of things usually leave a bad taste in my mouth. It’s almost like a school where they force/pressure you to buy some kind of health product which people can do without. Not only that, some of them say you have to buy it as part of the curriculum which is border line unethical I’d say.

In my opinion, the only true way to introduce supplement products of this fashion for a business that is trying to sell a product to its client base is to simply present it while demonstrating how it has helped them. Attaching it to your service in a forced way though just screams money grubber for the most part I’d say.

Example, imagine a gym where for a membership they charge you for the facilities as well they put in the price of these multi vitamins on top of it as part of the “package”. I would think the better thing to do would be to keep the membership separate and simply just demonstrate/showcase how someone in that gym has benefited from it. Usually a better buzz and credibility can be created that way too in terms of getting demand to actually buy the product.

While I’m sure any business would want to make an extra dollar anyway they can, reputation is one of those things that can’t really be bought back afterwards and so techniques like these should be avoided I’d say.

As expected, during the Christmas time there are quite of few items that are hot and as a result are in very limited quantities. This often results in regular consumers buying the items with the sole intent of reselling it to make a profit too. Just today I was reading this comment from a person who was so disgusted at people who were selling these items higher than what people could buy it for at the retail stores. Example, some of the items were $10 to $50 more than what you would pay at a store.

Now I guess the general mentality for that is how people feel cheated since the cost of the item is more known in that situation. For myself though, it’s almost no different than what a regular company does. For example, the price that the retail store charges is normally dependent on what the supplier charges them for the item in the first place. In this scenario, the retail store is the supplier and the person selling it then becomes the retail store instead. Whether it is an individual or company doing it doesn’t make too much of a difference I’d say.

I think the only time I would really despise a regular person selling an item in this fashion is if they somehow started buying out the inventory in large quantities and then forcing people to pay these sky high prices. Although, the same would go with a traditional company as well where I wouldn’t agree with that practice.