We've signed up for the Aldi supermarket chain's email newsletter and head there every week for various technology bargains, to say nothing of cheaper food and grocery items.Aldi has become a major ally in our war on inflation ... next week offers the thrill of new slippers!.
We've also bought a subscription to simplesavings.com.au, for a weekly newsletter and “savings vault” of advice from other frugal shoppers that has helped us trim the cost of a vast range of goods and services, ranging from car insurance to shampoo.
For big-ticket items, we've been drawn increasingly to online auctions. The best known of these is eBay, but our favourite is a local operation at Graysonline which seems to have been adopted by technology manufacturers as an outlet for either over-stocked, or run-out items.
A couple of weeks ago, for instance, we noticed an auction of “new HP LaserJet printers with automatic duplex capability” with bidding starting at $9. We checked the details. There were several new monochrome HP LaserJetP3005D printers, with a 400MHz processor and 64MB of memory capable of printing up to 1200x1200 dpi (dots per inch) resolution at up to 35 pages per minute, with a duty cycle of up to 100,000 pages per month. It included a 12-month manufacturer's warranty.
It's a robust printer which we couldn't have afforded at the best retail price we could find: around $1100. There were several units up for sale at Graysonline, however, and we joined the bidding at around $240. Eventually we picked one up with a bid of $384. With the buyer's premium and freight, we had bought a great printer for a total investment of $482.
It still didn't quite meet our needs. What we really needed was the networked version, the P3005DN, but they weren't included in the auction. The cheapest price we had been able to find for that model was around $1500. Fortunately, the P3005D has a slot for a network card, so we drove out to the Hawthorn branch of Harris Technology, and picked up an HP 620N JetDirect card for $459. It took us minutes to install, and it worked perfectly with our collection Windows, Mac and Linux desktops. We had pretty much the equivalent of the DN model, and our total saving was close to $600.
There are potential hazards in the world of online bidding, and we happened to stumble on a couple of them. Part way through the bidding on the printer, for instance, as we flicked between individual items, trying to lodge the lowest bid possible, we discovered that we'd bid on one of several P3005 printers, which we hadn't noticed had been included in the offering of P3500D units. It's about $100 cheaper than the “D”, doesn't have automatic duplex, and it has only 48MB of memory.
With the auction nearing its end, we were forced to make a risky decision. We placed another bid on the “D”, and began praying that someone would outbid us on the lesser model. Fortunately, that's precisely what happened.
The other problem arises from the fact that certain personality types – including Bleeding Edge – tend to get over-enthusiastic at auctions. At the height of our excitement over the printer, we had a look at the other items on sale, and decided to bid $29 for a 2GB SanDisk SD memory card. According to the catalogue, the ORP (Original Retail Price) for that item was $299. While that may have been true at one point, it's certainly nowhere near the current price, as we would have discovered if we'd been as thorough in checking that item out via Google, as we had the printer. At Michaels Camera Store, we would have paid $53, but the current price online is around $35.
Sadly, nobody outbid us on that one. With the buyer's premium and freight, we ended up paying $47.61 for an item that may have been “brand new”, as the catalogue stated, but certainly didn't arrive with its original packaging. We wrote it off as collateral inflation.
UPDATE 9.31am: Oh dear. We did recommend caution, and here's an example of what can go wrong when you don't check the prices, and aren't careful about what you're bidding for. The ORP on this HP iPAQ RX4540 Mobile Media Companion says $499. You can see if you click on the bidding history link, that the previous bid was $219. But J.S. from Port Macquarie has committed to paying $579. We suspect J.S. is going to get quite a shock when he or she discovers that what they've just bought - assuming no one is foolish enough to trump the bid - is not the HP iPAQ RX5765 they thought they were bidding on.