We’re all hot-wired for a bargain

By Ken McGaffin
Posted Saturday, November 6, 2004

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.