Shopping in January Sales
Everyone loves a bargain (well everyone who reads this website should do!), and there is no better time to try to find a shopping bargain than at the start of the year in the January sales.
No matter what you are thinking of buying, new TV, carpets, new kitchen, perhaps even a car, you can usually find some sort of January sale that is offering you a discount.
Unfortunately January sales are often not such a good deal as they try to make out, and sometimes you can get carried away thinking you are saving yourself a fortune, whilst in reality you are not saving any money, or worse, actually paying over the odds for something.
There are strict rules as to how retailers portray a January (or any other) sales promotion, but even these can be open to abuse.
Sales and Discount Items.
Before an item can be put on ‘sale', it has to be sold at a number of outlets at the ‘full' price for a number of days. However this doesn't actually guarantee you that the sale price is a bargain. For example a particularly large shop could set aside a selection of its stock late in Winter that it is going to mark down in the January sales. They are then free to put whatever inflated price they feel like on the stock in the knowledge that hardly anyone will buy it during the Winter months (and if anyone does then they make a really good margin on it). When the January sales come they then ‘knock' a significant portion off the price, and the customers come flocking; not realising that the reduction in price is really bringing the items down to a realistic level.
Some shops even have a rolling sales pattern which means there is rarely, if ever, a time without a sale on. Carpet and Sofa stores are particularly notorious for this.
They will have a section in their show room for the full price models, whilst the rest of the store is having some sort of January, Spring, Summer, Autumn or Winter ‘sale'.
The full price models serve two purposes, firstly they give the customer a perception that the shop sells expensive high quality items, and so the stuff in the sale are a great bargain that should be snapped up as soon as possible. Secondly, putting some items on for ‘full price' allows the shop to offer them at the ‘discounted' price a few months later. The cycle goes round and around, with a selection of items being full price for a few months, then put in the sale for a few months, and vice versa.
January Sales Limited Offer
Another area that the January Sales can be abused is when there is a large, usually national, advertising campaign offer amazing discounts and bargains on selected goods or items. These offers are usually fantastic deals and bring many customers flocking to their stores. However the small print on the January sales advertising campaign will usually state that "the offer is only available whilst stocks last". Never mind you may think, just get there early and you are bound to be able to pick up one of the sale items.
Well the ‘stock' levels can actually be shockingly low. I have tried to snap up a bargain item before in a January sale, only to be told that the one I was after has already sold out. It was a complete bargain price, probably at least 50% cheaper than any other deal on the market, and so I wasn't really surprised that they had already been snapped up even though I go to the shop quite early on the first day of the January Sales. Out of interest I inquired as to how many of these units had been available to start with. The young salesman told me, in a sort of whisper, "well there were only up to 5 units available per store, but we actually only got 3".
THREE UNITS?? I was stunned (until I remembered how cynical sales campaigns can be). This was a large national January Sales campaign, splashed all over the TV, Radio and Newspapers, offering great deals on laptops, yet they only had 3 laptop units per store. I would imagine that there were several hundred, possibly several thousand inquiries for this laptop at each store on the first day of the sales. So what did all these people do? Well the battled hardened probably shrugged it off and went home again, but many others may well have been tempted to look around the store and find other items to buy. Perhaps they were in the sale too, but with a less generous discount (and probably discounted from an inflated price), or maybe they weren't in the sale at all, but they might as well buy it there and then seeing as they had gone to the effort to make the trip.
The point is, there can often be eye popping deals offered to lure you into the store, and then once you are there you'll be unable to get the amazing bargain of a lifetime deal, but at least you can ‘save' yourself a few pounds by buying something else that is in the January Sale. Course you never actually save money, you just might end up paying a little bit less than you would have done before Christmas.
So how do you Shop in January Sales
The key to January sale shopping is to go with a fixed idea of what you are going to buy. Do your research, identify what you want before Christmas, and make a note of how much it costs. When the January sales come along, go to the shops only to buy what you have already identified, and make sure that the sales price really is a good bargain afterall.
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