Christmas shopping for my son is fun!

[Doc]

The credit for early Christmas shopping lies solely with my wife.  Truth be told, we have been actively buying gifts since about January.  She can sniff out a good deal like no-one I know, and she is dogged in her persistance to get it.  She has also got a lot of forethought, so we've already bought a bunch of great Christmas gifts for our nieces and nephews way back in January when they were on sale for dirt-cheap prices.

We both check every flyer and ad we get in the mail, as well as browse the online ads for local stores.  If we see something that we like and know it will make a great upcoming gift, we buy it.  If we know that a certain store is having a particularly great season-end clearance sale, we pick a day of the week to make a trip.

This is not to say that we buy cheap stuff though.  We buy nice things for a lot less than full retail.

Here's an example:  Not too recently, Toy Story was released on DVD and every store had them on "sale".  Most "sales" were about $2 less than retail, which was about $25 (CAD).  We really wanted to buy it, but held out for something a little better.  A couple of weeks later, a local store had a flyer advertising it for an amazing $6.88. 

Not too surprisingly, that store was sold out about 5 minutes after they opened.  This was fine by us.  So we took the flyer to another store that had a "price match" policy (that is, they will match any current Canadian retailer's advertised price).  This was perfect for us, because we also happened to have saved a coupon from that particular store for "15% off your next DVD purchase".  We price matched the $25 Toy Story DVD for $6.88, and saved an extra 15% on top of that.  We also happened to have a few more 15% off DVD coupons so we bought a couple more.  We got $75 worth of new release DVDs for less than $18, all above-board.

Everything we did adhered completely to the store's policies, so it's not like we ripped them off.  We were just smart about the way we shopped.
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I shop like that. And people call me a stingy miserly penny pinching bastard. A shoe store was closing it's doors forever. They had a Birkenstock clog on sale for 62 bucks. These clogs normally sell for about 150. They have a removeable cork footbed. The Oklahoma model. Well, this store was out... But I took their quoted price to another shoe outlet that promised to beat anybody's price. I also had a special coupon for this particular outlet, one I had been holding on to for quite some time. (No experation date) This coupon entitles the holder to buy one pair of shoes, and get any second pair of shoes for half of whatever you paid for the first pair. (Or equal or lesser value.)

So I went to the shoe outlet... They said they would sell me the clog for 60 bucks. I said I would take two pairs, and whipped out the coupon. Got the second pair for 30 dollars... Which really irked the manager, but there was nothing he could do. I got that coupon when that outlet opened, first day opening sale, and boy did it pay off.

Saving money is a good thing, and being miserly is not a bad thing, it's a virtue. You just keep saving money DeeBye... Only a fool pays full price.