Are You Taking Advantage of Sales or Are They Taking Advantage of You?

With Black Friday right around the corner, Mr. Clever Fox is here to tell you that sales are a great way to save money.

I’m guessing you think that’s obvious, but what might surprise you is how often it’s not true. In fact, retailers think of sales as a great way to get you to spend money, and many shoppers spend more when they believe they’re getting a deal than they would normally.

This phenomenon is due to human psychology, with both excitement and fear coming into play. Buying new things and getting a bargain is thrilling and satisfying. On the other hand, if we’re completely honest, loss aversion and fear-of-missing-out play a bigger role in opening our wallets than we might care to admit. If I told you that my $100 product was currently on sale for $50, you’re much more likely to talk yourself into spending $50 than to question whether you need the item at all.

And yet sales can be a golden opportunity to save money, specifically when you’re able to get something you need at a discount price. This article is going to show you how to do more strategic buying and less spontaneous shopping.

Flipping the script

Most of the time, we approach sales the way retailers want. The typical chain of events goes something like this: see a sale -> get excited about something -> buy it. We wind up talking ourselves into purchasing whatever the store or business happens to promote.

That’s not to say we lose all sense of whether we need something when it’s on sale, but it’s so easy to get caught up in the excitement (and FOMO) of a promotion that we often make purchases we wouldn’t have otherwise made.

If you’d like to be a Clever Fox, I’m going to suggest you flip the script: decide you need something -> wait for a sale -> buy it. Do you see the difference?

Of course, there are situations where you can’t afford to wait to buy something, but a little bit of patience and detective work can save you a ton of money in many cases.

Examples big and small

Let me show you how this works with both everyday purchases and one-off products!

Software
Just before I was inspired to write this article, I was working on some performance improvements to speed up the Mr. Clever Fox website (it’s about as tedious a task as it sounds). As I was working on the problem, I determined that I needed to buy a particular software plugin for the job. It’s not free; in fact, it’s about $15 a month.

But it’s November, and Black Friday sales are right around the corner. So I Googled “<company name> black friday 2019” and discovered that this software company had a deal offering a 33% lifetime discount last year. I’m willing to bet they’ll do something similar this year, and I’m happy to wait a couple of weeks to find out.

Flights
I used to live in New Zealand and flew back and forth to the United States a couple of times a year. I noticed that the major airlines cycled through their sales like clockwork, and about every two months, flights home would drop a few hundred dollars when the deal came around.

A shirt
I found a shirt I liked on Amazon. It was selling for $25, which felt a little high-priced, leaving me on the fence about whether to purchase it. I wound up putting the shirt in the ‘Save for Later’ section of the cart. A couple of months later, I got a notification in the app that it was now on sale for 30% off.

Groceries
You may already be subconsciously aware of how grocery stores cycle what’s on sale. Think about a product you buy: Is it sometimes full price and sometimes on sale? Can you stock up when it’s on sale and skip it when it’s not? This strategy won’t work for perishable food, but it’ll save you money on just about everything else.

These are just a few examples. Some other categories where sales can save a bundle are computers, electronics, appliances, housewares, and even cars. The sky’s the limit.

Five ways to figure out when products are going on sale

Some businesses never have sales, while others seem to have a deal on so frequently one wonders if they ever charge full price. There are certainly some reliable times of year to expect sales, such as Black Friday and around major holidays. Figuring out when something will go on sale isn’t an exact science, but here are five methods you can use to read the tea leaves.

1. Ask someone: Whether online or in a physical store, it pays to ask. Sometimes employees will be reluctant to tell you if an item you appear ready to buy is about to be discounted (though you can get lucky: I once had a clerk in a department store suggest I wait to purchase because they had a massive sale starting at noon that day). Even if you don’t get a direct answer, you can determine whether the store typically has sales and when the next one might be.

2. Join the mailing list: If you’re interested in a specific product from a specific company, this is an excellent way to get notified when it’s on sale. You might also get a promotional coupon just for joining, which is instant money!

3. Look back: Past sales are a good predictor of future sales. In my example of the software plugin, I guessed that the company might run a Black Friday promotion and used Google to look up whether they had done one last year. You can use search terms like “<company name> <sale>” or “<product name> <sale> <prior year>”. You’ll often find old blog posts, mentions on deal-reporting websites, or even pages on the company’s own website that talk about past sales. You can use this information to infer when a future sale might happen.

4. Use social media: This is another useful tool to sniff out sales. You can scroll back in time on a company’s feed to see when prior sales happened, and it’s also an easy way to ask a business about upcoming sales.

5. Be observant: Unless it’s an unfamiliar company or product, you probably have some intuitive sense of whether a product is likely to go on sale.

Don’t lose your head

We’ve been talking about how to play offense to take advantage of sales. Now let’s talk more about playing defense. Remember that businesses design sales to draw you in and get you to make spontaneous purchases. Here are three things that will help you resist that urge.

1. Lead with need: Always start by questioning whether you need (ok, ok, or want) to buy something. For example, there might be a sale running on a new phone, but make sure you’ve decided it’s time to replace your phone first.

2. Put your blinders on: These days, there’s a whole cottage industry built around calling your attention to sales. Take Amazon’s Prime Day, for instance, when the company ran thousands of deals on a wide variety of products. I’m guessing you heard about it because most bloggers and even many mainstream news sites started running articles about the “ten-best-whatevers” to buy.

3. Remember other options: Sales aren’t always the cheapest way to get something. Just because an item is on sale doesn’t mean you can’t save even more money buying a used, refurbished, or generic item. In some cases, you can also consider repairing something instead of replacing it, borrowing something from your friends and neighbors, and just plain deciding not to buy anything at all.

Is it worth it?

Sometimes it’s nice to simply buy the thing you want right now and be done with it. I get that. I do that plenty of times myself. But even if you use the “wait for a sale” strategy only occasionally or only on significant purchases, like a new computer or appliance, it can save you hundreds of dollars a year.

On the other side of the coin, having a proactive strategy towards sales will help you look at them in a different light and resist impulse buying.

Do you have any other tips on hacking sales and using them strategically? Or any stories about times you’ve taken full advantage of a sale? I’d love to read about them in the comments!