|
Were_all_hot wired_for_a_bargain
| Were all hot-wired for a bargain
One of the few universal traits in people is the joy of finding
a bargain. From rich and poor, young and old, east, west – you
name it – the thought of getting something below the ticket
price is great.
If you want to get people to stand in the January snow for six
hours, then lop 50 per cent of your shop’s big ticket items.
Even garage sales can pull in hundreds of people, despite the
fact that most of the stuff is second-hand.
Human beings, it seems, have been hot-wired for bargains from
the year dot. So far anthropologists have yet to find evidence
of a tribe who paid 10 per cent above the odds. If they ever did
exist, they all probably died out in debtors’ prison.
Even when people have more money than they know what to do with
it, the sense of a bargain usually prevails. Just ask Herb
Kelleher, who founded no-frills airline Southwest. You won’t
find him paying the full price, and he’s not short of a few
dollars.
Yet for all of that, running along side of our desire for a
bargain is the almost pathological dislike among many of us to
spend a lot of our time actually looking for a bargain.
Sure, if it lands on our doorstep, we’ll grab it. And if we
don’t mind queuing in the snow, then that wide-screen TV is
yours Sir for just $100. (OK, I jest, make that $50).
But when there’s a game on, or when you just want to hang out,
hell, sure a bargain can wait. Except, of course, it rarely
does. The early bird usually gets his bargain as well as a cheap
breakfast.
So, what if you had someone who did the queuing for you? Not
only that, but what if they were not tied to the vendor in any
way and helped with the possible pitfalls as well?
That’s where Bargain.com comes in, and we are not just talking
fridge freezers here. This is the big stuff: cars, http://www.bargain.com/fe
/autos/ and houses, http://www.bargain.com/fe
/homes/. Yes, houses - thousands and thousands of them, from
condos to mansions, East, West, North and South.
More and more Americans own homes - about 70 per cent of
households at the last count. This is a far cry from the early
1900s, when only a quarter of houses were owner-occupied. In the
intervening period, greater prosperity, mobility and more
readily available finance though the likes of Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac, have fed the trend in home ownership.
The process of finding a home has also been transformed, from
having to scour the newspapers and call into realtors to being
able to search online. Searching for homes on the internet is
not in itself that new – some people have been doing it for
nearly 10 years. During that time, things have changed a lot
online, thankfully, and websites have become more user friendly
over that period.
But Bargain.com has gone a few steps farther and changed the way
it is done. Bargain.com uses a subscription service so that it
is not reliant on advertisers, nor does it act as an agent for
the properties sold. In that way, prospective buyers are offered
potential properties at the lowest available price.
Bargain.com uses advanced search and database technology to
provide fast and accurate information on pricing, quality and
the availability of products, even hard-to-find distressed
properties.
Customer service staff are available 24 hours a day, seven days
a week to help members find the best deals. If you sign up to
the service, you can use email, fax and home delivery of
regularly updated catalogs.
More than five million homes were sold in the US last year - a
lot of properties. If you were looking to buy last year, how
many of those properties might have suited? Chances are there
were quite a few. With Bargain.com, you probably would have
found them.
Sometimes we forget how much technology has helped take more and
more of the drudge out of life. But no matter how technology
changes, we’re all psychologically programmed to sniff out a
bargain. The great thing about sites such as Bargain.com is that
they can do a lot of our sniffing for us.
About the author:
Ken McGaffin is a consultant and writer on ecommerce websites
and online promotion.
|
|
| |
| |
