SIMON BROWN: It pays to know your prices

I was shopping last week: general grocery things. I generally check prices and am used to being shocked by food prices these days. But a box of half a dozen eggs I picked up was selling for R59.99. Yip, 10 bucks an egg.  Sure, these were fancy pure-white free-range and I assume they had gone to UCT to do an advanced five-year degree.  But R10 an egg?

The thing is, I never used to really check prices, but my wife did, and she remembers. This remembering is important, so you can spot the deals, or the rip-offs.

I remember once we needed butter and she refused to buy it because the price was well above what it had been previously. So we had no butter. But a while later she came home with six blocks of butter and a smug look on her face. The price had come back to below what she considered fair and the retailer had also had a special if you bought two, making the butter even cheaper. So she had stocked up, putting the extra blocks in the freezer. We had butter for months.

Now, with food inflation at levels last seen in 2009, food is just really expensive. But knowing what prices have been still helps, especially with specials.

One scam we’ve all seen is the one that promises a price reduction but the reality is that the store first raised the price then offered the supposed “discount”. My wife never falls for those.

Online, we see prices changing all the time and popular websites such as Takealot and Amazon move prices around for all sorts of reasons. The trick is that there are many websites that track prices and the changes. Google one of them, then drop in the URL of what you want to buy and it’ll give you a price history, thus answering the question — is it really cheap?

Google does this for air tickets. A search for flights will tell you if the tickets are well priced or expensive, not to mention the expected trend. They’ll even send you e-mail alerts as the price changes.

A friend has a strategy. He manually monitors prices for months before making a big-ticket purchase. He builds spreadsheets and tracks price movements with Google alerts, then waits for a truly special price to arrive. I wasn’t convinced by the idea, but his data shows clearly that big-ticket items go on special all the time. All you need to do is know what’s a typical price with some historical data and then, when the special arrives, it stands out.

So know your prices, track them and resist paying top price for something that may well be cheaper in time. It does mean more planning and flexibility around your purchases, and sometimes going without butter. But the savings can be real — and it means a little more in your pocket.