Queen's Birthday bargain hunting.

Sorry if you were looking out for this on Tuesday. The long weekend meant a days delay on stuff.co.nz and so this comes out a day later too. 
This week on stuff, I'm talking decision making. Death by a thousand paper cuts kind of decision making, where just as you think you've nailed it, you discover there are another four decisions to make within the decision you just made. 
In that mix, we've needed to work out what's going on in the kitchen. The units and benches themselves were easy decisions, with Laminex giving us some great advice, but the appliances were another story. In the grand scheme of the build it's not a huge amount of cash, but somehow, spending it in a store makes it seem like a bigger deal. One that we wanted to make sure we squeezed into the allowance we had in the budget and didn't go over.
So in the spirit of decision making - here is a treatise on bargain hunting.

Appliance shopping seems to be one of those things, like buying a used car, where bargaining is totally acceptable. I'm not the bargain for everything type, but my dad is, maybe I learned from a master. Either way, there are some people who would never ask for a discount, and some people who almost always do. I'm not trying to tell anyone how to suck eggs, but in case you're one of the unconverted to bargain hunting, I thought I would share just how much there is to be saved with a bit of gentle persuasion. 

On our shopping list we had: 

• an oven
  
• a cook top
• a rangehood
• a dishwasher
• a small freezer

First thing to note, is having a few items on our list helped enormously. Our bargaining power went up, because its a bigger sale for the operator. Second, we made a list of a few different versions of the appliances we wanted and then Mr Building Boxes made a wee spreadsheet of the standard retail prices for all of them. Then we shopped around. And we did it on a long weekend - Queens Birthday - where every store in the land is promising you bigger and better for less.
When I say shopped around, really I rang around, and was given a quote over the phone or via email with a "queen's birthday sale price". We then narrowed it down to the two stores with the right appliances and the best prices and went shopping. This meant we could a)check that the models we thought we wanted were what we wanted (which turned out not to be the case with the dishwasher) and b)could look the sales folk in the eye... 
We ended a pretty quick whip around two stores clear about what we wanted, and with two much more competitive sets of quotes. We then went to the store with the best set of quotes, asked them to match the cheaper items from the other store and boom. We saved $1756. 
I'll say that again. The advertised price for the items (some of which were on "special") for all five items was $6865, and we paid $5109. Saving $1756. All with a relatively painless and pretty quick process. Sometimes it pays to be a bargain hunter.

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