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thebratqueenSo I bought myself a treadmill.
I'll report more on it once I get to, you know, use it. What I wanted to talk about now is buying it.
Whenever I make an expensive purchase I like to do my research. In some cases I can do it all online and get my price shopping done to boot. But for treadmills I wanted to try them out, which meant going in person. I also wanted to get the thing actually into my apartment, and ordering online, though free shipping can be involved, tends to boil down to "We'll leave it on a street near your house and you can haul it in yourself. We may possibly avoid any streets at all by kicking it out onto the highway. If you're nice we'll stop the truck when we do it." So I figured shop local.
I'm going to stop here for a second and re-pimp Gift of Fear. Because you may dismiss it as just being about avoiding crime but really it gives you skills for dealing with so many scenarios. You learn how to read people. As for example, a salesman who replies to "Hey, how's it going?" With "Busy. I'm getting married in October." Which, yanno, unless you proposed last night and aren't over your squee, I don't need to know.
So that's what Gavin would call volunteering unnecessary details as a way to try to build a sense of trust and being part of a team. Or at least that's the attempt. What it really did was make me listen with an extra grain of salt to everything that this guy said. Which is part of why I moved on to another store. (Really I would've done that anyway as part of the research process, but fakey bonding attempts were an influence in picking what store I went with.)
The next store on the list was the one I ended up going with. It's part of a chain of stores, but it met two key requirements for me which were 1) Having the lower-end brands of treadmills that my research had said were not the platonic ideal of treadmills but perfect for the needs of someone like myself who just wants to do brisk walking even if the weather sucks while 2) Not being Wal-Mart.
I also had a coupon for this store but I deliberately did not bring it with me to force me to not buy anything when I went. I wanted to make sure to do research and price-checking on anything I saw. And sure enough they had a treadmill there that appeared to be exactly what I wanted but which I hadn't heard about before. So I left to come back another night
Fast forward to Thursday. My research online has found out that yep, this treadmill at this price point is exactly what I wanted. But I discover that, though it's already on sale at the store I went to, Home Shopping Network has it for $100 less. A little more research and I find out the store does price matching. All I have to do is bring a printout of the ad with me. Woohoo!
Printout in hand I head over to the store after work. I flag someone down and ask to buy the treadmill I want. I will now split the story into two parts so you can follow the threads from beginning to end.
The first thread is the price matching. I get up to the register where a sales clerk and a manager just happen to be. Politely, I say that I'd called earlier and was told to bring in a printout for price-matching. So voila, here was my print-out. Clerk looks at it. Says, "I don't know if we price match HSN." She gives it to the manager who reads it and also says, "Yeah, I don't know if we price match HSN."
Now I had wondered if they would since HSN is a special case, price-wise. But the key moment of this interaction was this - the manager, while saying he didn't know, tried to hand my printout back to me. The idea being he was hoping that this would be the end of it. But see for me the key words in his reply were "I don't know" Which is why I didn't take the printout back and replied, again politely, "Who would know?"
At which point the manager then called the district manager, and I got my $100 write-off. Granted there was a little waiting involved for the district manager to get back to us but - $100. A whole Benjamin just for standing around for a few minutes while using my Treo to check my email. Not a bad exchange if you ask me.
So the conclusion of this first thread is that it pays to do your research and it doesn't hurt to ask about price matching. Nor does it hurt to make sure you're talking to the right person.
We now rewind a tiny bit for the second thread.
When I flagged someone down to buy the treadmill, the first reply was about the extended waranty. Now since I've worked retail I know that things like this are often because salesclerks have been told they have to or they'll get dinged for it. So I replied with a no thank you and we moved on to the cashier/manager portion of the sale.
Now the cashier and the manager asked if I wanted the extended waranty. And asked. And asked. And ASKED. The manager, in particular, was taking full advantage of my wait for the price match by pitching this warranty to me with, by my calculation, every breath. I'm all for not punishing a salesclerk for being forced to do a pitch. I am, however, not going to put up with someone who refuses to hear "No." So finally, after the billionth time of "Are you SURE you don't want the warranty? Because if you don't get it you will pay MILLIONS OF DOLLARS to fix this treadmill, and lo fire and plagues shall spread o'er the land and cats and dogs will continue to wage war upon one another only they'll be much meaner about it and it won't be fun for anyone." Or words to that effect. So finally I replied with the technique that my dad taught me, which is to, again politely, go all wide-eyed and say:
"Wow, if this breaks down so often that it needs the extra warrenty, maybe I shouldn't buy it after all."
It's fun to watch them derail at that.
I will say that this kind of pushiness will normally put me off of a store. At this particular point it didn't because the advantage of the $100 price match plus the ability to not have to deal with scheduling a delivery were enough to make me hang out for a bit. Lower price match, no advantage delivery-wise, I would've walked.
What amused me was that the warranty was $100 and change. Part of me wanted to ask why they thought I'd be willing to spend $100 when I was standing aorund waiting with the goal of saving $100 but I didn't get into it. As Gavin says, 'No' is a complete sentence.
So that's my story. A little research, a little effort, I got what I wanted and I saved $200 by not giving in to sales pressure. I'm quite pleased. =)
I'll report more on it once I get to, you know, use it. What I wanted to talk about now is buying it.
Whenever I make an expensive purchase I like to do my research. In some cases I can do it all online and get my price shopping done to boot. But for treadmills I wanted to try them out, which meant going in person. I also wanted to get the thing actually into my apartment, and ordering online, though free shipping can be involved, tends to boil down to "We'll leave it on a street near your house and you can haul it in yourself. We may possibly avoid any streets at all by kicking it out onto the highway. If you're nice we'll stop the truck when we do it." So I figured shop local.
I'm going to stop here for a second and re-pimp Gift of Fear. Because you may dismiss it as just being about avoiding crime but really it gives you skills for dealing with so many scenarios. You learn how to read people. As for example, a salesman who replies to "Hey, how's it going?" With "Busy. I'm getting married in October." Which, yanno, unless you proposed last night and aren't over your squee, I don't need to know.
So that's what Gavin would call volunteering unnecessary details as a way to try to build a sense of trust and being part of a team. Or at least that's the attempt. What it really did was make me listen with an extra grain of salt to everything that this guy said. Which is part of why I moved on to another store. (Really I would've done that anyway as part of the research process, but fakey bonding attempts were an influence in picking what store I went with.)
The next store on the list was the one I ended up going with. It's part of a chain of stores, but it met two key requirements for me which were 1) Having the lower-end brands of treadmills that my research had said were not the platonic ideal of treadmills but perfect for the needs of someone like myself who just wants to do brisk walking even if the weather sucks while 2) Not being Wal-Mart.
I also had a coupon for this store but I deliberately did not bring it with me to force me to not buy anything when I went. I wanted to make sure to do research and price-checking on anything I saw. And sure enough they had a treadmill there that appeared to be exactly what I wanted but which I hadn't heard about before. So I left to come back another night
Fast forward to Thursday. My research online has found out that yep, this treadmill at this price point is exactly what I wanted. But I discover that, though it's already on sale at the store I went to, Home Shopping Network has it for $100 less. A little more research and I find out the store does price matching. All I have to do is bring a printout of the ad with me. Woohoo!
Printout in hand I head over to the store after work. I flag someone down and ask to buy the treadmill I want. I will now split the story into two parts so you can follow the threads from beginning to end.
The first thread is the price matching. I get up to the register where a sales clerk and a manager just happen to be. Politely, I say that I'd called earlier and was told to bring in a printout for price-matching. So voila, here was my print-out. Clerk looks at it. Says, "I don't know if we price match HSN." She gives it to the manager who reads it and also says, "Yeah, I don't know if we price match HSN."
Now I had wondered if they would since HSN is a special case, price-wise. But the key moment of this interaction was this - the manager, while saying he didn't know, tried to hand my printout back to me. The idea being he was hoping that this would be the end of it. But see for me the key words in his reply were "I don't know" Which is why I didn't take the printout back and replied, again politely, "Who would know?"
At which point the manager then called the district manager, and I got my $100 write-off. Granted there was a little waiting involved for the district manager to get back to us but - $100. A whole Benjamin just for standing around for a few minutes while using my Treo to check my email. Not a bad exchange if you ask me.
So the conclusion of this first thread is that it pays to do your research and it doesn't hurt to ask about price matching. Nor does it hurt to make sure you're talking to the right person.
We now rewind a tiny bit for the second thread.
When I flagged someone down to buy the treadmill, the first reply was about the extended waranty. Now since I've worked retail I know that things like this are often because salesclerks have been told they have to or they'll get dinged for it. So I replied with a no thank you and we moved on to the cashier/manager portion of the sale.
Now the cashier and the manager asked if I wanted the extended waranty. And asked. And asked. And ASKED. The manager, in particular, was taking full advantage of my wait for the price match by pitching this warranty to me with, by my calculation, every breath. I'm all for not punishing a salesclerk for being forced to do a pitch. I am, however, not going to put up with someone who refuses to hear "No." So finally, after the billionth time of "Are you SURE you don't want the warranty? Because if you don't get it you will pay MILLIONS OF DOLLARS to fix this treadmill, and lo fire and plagues shall spread o'er the land and cats and dogs will continue to wage war upon one another only they'll be much meaner about it and it won't be fun for anyone." Or words to that effect. So finally I replied with the technique that my dad taught me, which is to, again politely, go all wide-eyed and say:
"Wow, if this breaks down so often that it needs the extra warrenty, maybe I shouldn't buy it after all."
It's fun to watch them derail at that.
I will say that this kind of pushiness will normally put me off of a store. At this particular point it didn't because the advantage of the $100 price match plus the ability to not have to deal with scheduling a delivery were enough to make me hang out for a bit. Lower price match, no advantage delivery-wise, I would've walked.
What amused me was that the warranty was $100 and change. Part of me wanted to ask why they thought I'd be willing to spend $100 when I was standing aorund waiting with the goal of saving $100 but I didn't get into it. As Gavin says, 'No' is a complete sentence.
So that's my story. A little research, a little effort, I got what I wanted and I saved $200 by not giving in to sales pressure. I'm quite pleased. =)
