How much is it worth to drive all over looking for those bargains? With the cost of gas and insurance factored in to the "cost of travel" it gets more and more critical to decide just how much travel is worth the bargain price. After all, if you found a gas price of 10 cents per gallon cheaper, how far would you drive to fill up there? At the typical 10 gallon tank size on many cars these days, that 10 cents would only add up to $1.00 in savings.
Conversely, if you are driving a pickup or car of anything but very recent age, you might be getting -- what -- 15 miles to the gallon, for city travel? And gas is getting close to $3.00 per gallon, so if that bargain store is 15 miles away, then for your 30 miles round trip is going to cost you 2 gallons of gas, or $6.00 or so. Does this offset the savings you found? So we need to think about how we go after "bargains" as well as where they are vs. how much they are.
Is that really a bargain?
Many of the "discount" stores truly do have very good discount prices, but sometimes the labels on the shelves seem so good you just have to grab that item, too! But is that really a discount?
You know the ones I mean -- a bottle of shampoo, for instance, $2.00! Well, sometimes you can go nextdoor to the grocery store and find it for $1.89 or something. Granted, this is not so much of a difference, but still, the difference is there. It gets into your mind that those prices are indeed discount, when sometimes they just might not be.
I am not trying to discount the discounts -- as I mentioned, many of the prices are true discounts -- but we need to be careful and smart to realize the best values available. Shopping for value does indeed include finding the lowest price, other things being equal!
And to Top it off!
A search for local people/places is not really effective if you can't find them, eh? So below are some handy links to online maps. In most cases, you can put in your home address and then your search address result(s) will show you miles and route to get there. Comes in handy!
Google Maps
MapQuest
Yahoo Maps
