My girlfriend just bought $45 worth of groceries for $17 and change. Who pays for this? How is this possible?
“I feel just as reduced being called a system as I do a clock; life’s just not condensible…healing the world is an inside job.” - Thomas Harryman, Mindwalk.
I don’t know about the groceries, but the airfare gimmick is a waste of time. Just call the airlines - you’re gonna pay that much anyway.
They just don’t like you, Johnny.
I got a ticket to SF last year as Thanksgiving was fast approaching. Airlines gave my quotes of $485-$650, they said that Thanksgiving was the busiest time of the year and that it would be just about impossible for me to find anything cheaper.
I put in an offer at Priceline and got a ticket the next day for $220 on Continental.
My wife signed up for this, then gave up in disgust…
When you do the groceries thing, you get a limited number of “half-price tokens” for signing up. But you earn more of these tokens for doing things like buying magazine subscriptions and giving them your friends e-mail addresses. So in other words, the kickbacks to Priceline from the magazine companies pay for your groceries.
When my wife figured out what was going on, she tried to cancel her account with them, but there was no apparent way to do that. The kicker was that they already had her credit card number, since you have to give it in order to browse their list of groceries.
Another kicker is that the product list was not complete, and only covered national brands (not the store brands). Since my wife buys the store brands to save money over the national brands, what was the point?
I wouldn’t be so cynical about Priceline if I were you…I got a great deal on a rental car from them.
I wouldn’t use them for airline tickets, because you can’t specify when in the day you want to fly. And I tried to use them for groceries, especially diapers…but they insist you be willing to accept more than one brand of them, and I ain’t putting my kids in anything but Pampers.
But if you’re willing to accept such terms, it’s definitely a good thing to try.
Chaim Mattis Keller
ckeller@kozmo.com
“Sherlock Holmes once said that once you have eliminated the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be
the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible.
The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks.”
– Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective
JohnnyHarvard said:
I’ll have to agree with Opus, Johnny - out of six or so tickets I’ve tried on PriceLine, my price was met on at least half, and was always much, much cheaper than I could get with the airlines.
Important to note, though, that I tend to be a spontaneous traveler, so quite often I am looking for tickets with less than a week’s notice. For more advanced notice (say, more than 21 days), it might be that the price gap is much narrower. Even so, it makes sense to get the airlines price (via Expedia or LowestFare), then make a bid on PriceLine for 50-75% of that and see what happens.
Ah. Chaim brought up the key point–"…they insist you be willing to accept more than one brand…"
I do not know how the other areas of Priceline work, but I do know how Priceline for groceries works.
As you know, manufacturers distribute coupons in order to get you to try their product and hopefully become loyal users. They also subsidize a lot of in-store sales and promotions for the same reason. This costs the companies a lot of money, but it seems to pay off, so they keep doing it.
Priceline works on the same principle. (Or it will work on the same principle. From what I understand, Priceline is eating the costs right now.) The companies will pay the difference between the Priceline cost and the store price.
Hypothetical example: You want to buy diapers. You tell Priceline that you are willing to accept either Pampers or Huggies, and you bid $8. Huggies wants to promote their product, so they have authorized Priceline to accept bids of $8, so your bid is accpeted. You take your “Priceline Coupon” to the store and get your Huggies. The store price of the Huggies is $10. Who pays the $2? IIRC, you pay Priceline $8, Priceline pays the store $10, and Huggies pays Priceline $2. Of course, Priceline (and probably the store) takes a cut along the way.
There are two caveats you must keep in mind when deciding to use Priceline:
They accept lower bids from first-time users in order to sell them on the service. Have your girlfriend try to get the same $45 market basket again and see how much she pays.
The “compare at” price is not realistic. No smart shopper would bay $45 for that order of grocieries. That $45 is the full list(if that is the right term) price of those goods. Any reasonably savvy shopper would shop for sales, use coupons, and/or substitute store brands where acceptable, and thus get the goods for under $45.
I probably have a few of the details wrong. I apologize in advance.
The Half-Price Tokens and the magazine subscriptions are a bit of a hassle, but they are worth it if you have the time to spend on Priceline. It is the time involved that appears to be the biggest downfall. Unless I’m missing something completely, I feel I’ve really saved a big chunk of money on groceries through Priceline. I’ve used it about 5 or 6 times, and almost everytime I’ve saved about 1/3 to 1/2 on these groceries. Of course, you are not really given much leeway on what brands you choose, so there have been times I’ve had to go to more than one store to get my entire list. Again, it is very time-consuming, and if I’m too busy, Priceline is certainly not an option.
Green,
Thanks, that makes a lot of sense. Just in response to your point #2 about priceline’s “compare at” price, it wasn’t priceline that quoted 45$ as the price for this list of groceries, it was the grocery store who rang it up as 45$, and that BTW was including all coupons and store discounts. eg. the store had a package of bacon for about $4 with a buy 1 get one free sale. My girlfriend got a package for a dollar and change. With the sale she got 2 packages ($8 value) for a little over a dollar!
So what you are saying, Kenny, is that it’s really your girlfriend who brings home the bacon?
Opus,
ba dump <crash>
(:
Ah. Thanks for the clarification.
Now the interesting part is how Priceline manages to make money off of this. A friend of mine did a bit of programming for them, and got an explanation of how exactly the whole thing works, and we both agreed that it was about as complex as, say, quantum physics. Basically, they manage to get a tiny bit of money in a whole bunch of different places.