Money Saving Wednesday…Haggle with Your Grocer…A Big Favor

Posted by Carolyn on Apr 7th, 2010 in eBooks, Food Storage, Frugal Living, iPhone Apps, Money Savers | Comments Off

I am trying to track how many of you have been to can organizer by clicking on the link on our home page and how many have purchased after using the link. I’m trying to track down a problem so if you placed an order with can organizer will you please send me a note at carolyn@TotallyReady.com and let me know what you purchased. Thanks a bunch.

Next, I have had a few people comment on the post I did a few weeks ago about purchasing books to download.

“Today I want to talk abut ways to get books inexpensively or for free. I discovered some new apps which are, unfortunately, only on the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi right now. You can purchase these books for 99 cents. Check them out at: http://appible.com/a/our-apps/palm-webos/ They currently have 56 titles available. Many of these are collections so you actually receive more than one book and some of the books in the collections are not published individually. Prices for collection range from $1.50-$3.50.

One example of a collection is called the Romance Classics Collection and includes: Little Women, Anna Karenina, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations, A Room With A View, Wives and Daughters, & The Scarlet Letter . This collection sells for only $3.00 or 27 cents a book!
Included in their selections are many of the books our children are required to read in junior high and high school. I always tried to read what my kids were reading so I would know what was being required of them.”

I had some ask why you would pay if you can download them for free. A great questions, so here is the answer.

Republishing of public domain books is a standard practice in the print world. Almost every publisher does it. Half of Barnes & Noble books are public domain books which are sold for a profit.
If you were to go to site and download the book “for free” it would have several problems with it. It wouldn’t have any way to jump to chapters or to save your place while reading. If you closed the file and opened it up for later reading you would have to scroll all the way down to your last position. Not a big deal in the first chapter but by chapter 69 of War & Peace, it’s going to waste a lot of time.
These books are formatted to be more easily read. It takes work to do that. How quickly will someone pay $5 to rent a movie based on a public domain work but they really hesitate to pay $0.99 for the actual work of formatted to increase reading pleasure?
It’s just $0.99! As with the collections some of the books are only $0.27! It is well worth the money to me to have a finished product that I don’t have to reformat. My time is worth much more than that to me.

A little news about these guys. They are continuing to develop new apps and there are two I am really excited about. One is “Charters of Freedom” which includes the US Constitution, Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. What a great tool to have with you should you get involved in a question and need to refer to one of these documents. That app is only $0.99. The next find…is “Classics” which includes 13 titles such as Pride and Prejudice, The Wizard of OZ, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Call of the Wild and A Christmas Carrol. This one sells for $3.50 or $0.27 per title!!

Also, they now have all their Palm apps available in Canada, Mexico, France, Germany and England.

Now…bargaining at the Grocery Store. We have talked about how to save money on groceries several times and we will undoubtedly talk about it lots more as so much of our income goes to feeding our family. Did you know that most stores will make deals with you? You just have to ask. There are several reasons for this.

First: It is so much easier for them to sell you cases than to pay someone to stack 24 or more cans on the shelf. Naturally, the more cases you purchase at one time the more motivated they are to deal, so get together some friends who are also stocking up and visit the manages at your local stores. I would start with the store that already has the best prices but if they won’t deal just make sure the price you are given at the next place is cheaper than the everyday price at the cheapest store.

Second: They are guaranteed a sale. No need for them to worry when they order an extra 10 cases because they know you will pick them up and pay for them and the store will make an easy profit. Stores hate to have cases of food in the back room due to lack of space. Small back rooms are the reason stores run out of supplies so quickly during an emergency.

Third: No empty shelves. If a store is having a sale on pears for example, ask them to give you an additional few cents off per can if you order a few cases. This is a much better deal for the store because if you go clean off the shelves of all the pears there are none available for others to purchase and they lose money. You can very nicely point that out to the manager if he is reluctant.

Bottom line here is that this is a win win situation and the worst they can do is to say no. Try it and let us know the results.

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