Our Recent Experience Shopping for House Appliances
At some point in most of our adult lives, and if we are lucky, we’ve had the opportunity to buy a house. Usually one of the next steps is to start looking at appliances for said house. Although this step may appear to be a walk in the park when compared to buying a house, it is anything but that. The number of options for the various appliances can be very overwhelming.
Take our experience, for example. We set off one Saturday to start looking for appliances such as a cooktop, refrigerator, washer and dryer and mini-splits (air conditioning). In Mazatlán, we have three department stores that offer a variety of appliances: Liverpool, Cimaco and Sears (Sears Mexico has not seen the same fate as its US market). What we didn’t realize and what we weren’t ready for where the amount of options that each store would offer.
On that particular Saturday and unbeknownst to us, there was a huge holiday sale happening in all three stores. This made the shopping more difficult as we now wanted to take advantage of the sales and felt rushed due to the sales ending on Sunday, the very next day! So we had no choice but to pick up the speed on making decisions for the appliances that we were looking to buy.
We had a starting point of requiring appliances that were energy efficient to help dwindle the options down. We also knew the dimensions that we could not exceed for the spaces available for each appliance and that helped us to further narrow down the options. Anything too big was immediately out of the question for the lack of space.
So we went from one store to the next and then off to the next. By the time we realized it we had spent 6+ hours going store hopping without making a single purchase. We called it a day and decided to go recharge and review our options. In addition to reviewing the options we wanted to ensure we were exact on our measurements. We went back to the house we were remodeling to re-measure and restore our confidence in making executive decisions on selecting each appliance.
Post purchasing the cooktop, refrigerator, mini-splits and washer & dryer set, we had saved up to $65,000 MXN simply by shopping around and taking advantage of the holiday sale during that time. Going forward we know that while 6+ hours is a lot of time to be spending shopping around, we at least know that for every hour we did window shopping, we saved an additional $10,000 MXN. We consider this a job well done!