In recent news here it appears that Walmart has finally found a location to open up a store in the Vancouver area. The company tried to open up a store here before with a lot of people objecting to it as they felt it would harm the local community such as an increase of air pollution and the possibility of small businesses being forced to close.

It was announced recently that they are going to be taking over the building of an existing Costco wholesale business at Grandview Hwy as the company is planning to relocate to a different location. The Walmart store is set to open sometime near 2009 and is suppose to create hundreds of new jobs. People can’t really argue about the location here either now as it is a busy commercial area as it is.

What is really interesting to me is that just a few blocks away from this location is a supermarket called The Real Canadian Superstore that has been there for ages and is where I normally shop a lot. I’m one of those people who have read the stories on how Walmarts in the US have been able to put companies like these out of business as everyone wants everything cheaper. As a result, it almost becomes as if Walmart is the economy afterwards as people work and purchase goods from it with no one else to really go to.

I’m personally one of the more open minded people in this situation though. I can definitely see how this could have a negative impact as while I’m sure it will enable a lot of people to buy goods for cheaper, in the long run a company with that much control can pretty much dictate things such as wage standards or making it very difficult for local suppliers to compete with others who use cheaper labor.

At the same time, I can’t deny that this has got to be one of the most prolific examples of capitalism as they pretty much earned their success from ground up. If you think about it, they are only really giving what the majority of people want as in the end the consumers control who comes out at the top.

Honestly though, they do have Walmart stores in other cities here within the province and price wise it seems to be on par with a lot of other businesses. Should be interesting to see how this develops.

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Today I was talking to a person who mentioned that he wanted to buy some kind of weed puller for this one day that he was holding an event in his backyard. He mentioned that it cost about $30 or so which wasn’t too bad.

This got me thinking on how many times we tend to buy items where we only use it once and then throw it in say the closet to never be used again. For myself when it comes to these types of items, if I don’t intend to use it at least say once every two months I tend to explore other options such as borrowing a similar item from a friend or family member if available.

It’s just like when we were younger I suppose. What’s the point of say everyone buying the same toy/game when you could easily just lend your copy to the other if they plan to play it through once only? As long as you don’t abuse the trust/generosity, I’m sure most people are more than happy to help you save money in these ways. More than likely you would do the same too.

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For these next few weeks there seems to be an excess amount of people who happen to have birthdays coming up as well as other occasions that normally involve buying presents for people. As a result, I have been trying to find presents for people that I thought would be suiting.

Another person who was shopping for the same people was telling me on how this was such a financially draining week as she was using up her entire monthly non essential budget solely on gifts for others.

This got me thinking too as if you are in a situation where there are say too many birthdays and you are on a very tight budget as it is which one of the following would you do?

1) Determine how much money you can truly afford and divide it equally amongst the recipients or even giving things that are more personal instead.

2) Spend however much you would normally spend on a person by using tools such as a credit card even if it means adding more debt to yourself.

3) Delay giving certain people a present so that you can get them what you intended once you have the funds to do so.

I personally would be inclined to do the first option. Although realistically, I think most of the time people have a “I can so I will” mentality and will instead opt for say option two and start racking up on the credit card. It just seems more like a debt that you are paying back to the other person, so to speak, as oppose to giving a gift if you are spending more than you can afford I’d say.

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I think almost everyone has done this at one time or another where whenever we shop in say a store or supermarket for items that are in some kind of package/container we tend to grab the ones at the far back. I guess the logic is that the one at the back is somehow newer and so we perceive that as getting a better value for our dollar.

Sometimes there are legitimate reasons for this such as just the other day I saw this guy who was interested in buying a radio it seemed and he had absolutely no problem in opening up the package and literally plugged it into a wall to see how it was like. He did eventually put the radio back in the box and afterwards grabbed a new box of the same product to purchase that one. So in those cases I can see why you would want to grab the ones in the back.

Other times though such as when I see people buying cereal where all the products have the same expiry date and are clearly unopened it’s just amazing to see the effort that people go to in order to get the one from the far back. I’m all for trying to get the most for your dollar, but at the same time sometimes you have to realize that the item you are buying isn’t any better or worse than what everyone else is going to buy. Time is money too.

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Today I had to buy some simple stationary products such as paper clips and tab dividers. It was definitely interesting as there is a business that specializes in these types of items called “Grand and Toy” and it happened that I was at a mall called Metrotown which the business had a presence in.

As apparent though, the business was closing its operations in the mall and they had these 50% off signs plastered everywhere as they had to get rid of everything. I figured that was a perfect opportunity to get the supplies that I needed for less. I was looking at some of the prices and even with the 50% off items offer it still seemed rather expensive such as $10 for a basic color coded tab divider.

Since it was the mall, I decided to look around and went into the dollar store to try my luck. The last time I shopped at a dollar store was just for goofy party products. I actually did happen to find what I was looking for and ended up buying my items from there which ended up to be a little over $3.

While these aren’t exactly the type of places I would go to buy things that I would be very picky about quality wise, another good thing to going to stores such as these from time to time is that you can develop a sense of price value for certain products to immediately recognize if something is a good deal or not.

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