I have found that
Even with shipping charges, almost everything you want to buy is a better deal on the internet than from brick and mortar stores.
First, you save travel time and expense during the shopping phase. Then you save sales tax when you buy.
Since I live in a county that has a single traffic light (affectionately known as The County Traffic Light) travel expense for "shopping" can be expensive and eat up way more than the savings over buying the item at the first store you come to no matter what the price.
My father is married to a Costa Rican and, bless her heart, she will drive 65 miles round trip to Gainesville and spend all day shopping and spend $25 in fuel trying to save a dollar on a $10 item. She is so proud of herself when she saves money. We live in North Florida. When she first came to visit, she had a hard time understanding why we couldn't drive up to New York City and have lunch and be back home in time for dinner. It didn't look that far on the map. (:^)
We had a nice lesson yesterday about grocery stores and "Marketing". She truly did not understand how devious store executives could be. She began to understand devious when I explained why milk is always located in the first row of the traffic pattern. How, by the time she spent 45 minutes dragging that gallon of milk around in the store and then putting it in a hot car and only making one or two stops on the way home, the milk had warmed up to a point that the shelf life had been reduced to about two days. The light bulb went on when I explained that she wasn't the customer, her wallet was. The object being to get her wallet back into the store as soon as possible. That, coupled with the fact that the corner convenience store sells the same brand of milk as a loss leader will better the quality of my morning coffee immeasurably.
BT
AI
