Tag: Amazon

With no end in site to Lorena’s new (to us) furniture refurbishing projects and her fervor to do them, we decided to buy her a new hand sander. We looked on line at both Walmart and Amazon and, again, Amazon was not even close. This time we would have had to pay a 30% premium for the privilege of buying the closest equivalent at Avalon to what was offered by Walmart. to buy from Amazon. There was not really a whole lot of difference in the offerings. The specs are below. We had two ways to get the sander in our hands from Walmart: 1) Pick it up at our local Walmart which we drive by several times per week or 2) make a purchase of $35 which we needed to do (sand paper and some other supplies) for the project whichever choice we made. Amazon had a one day shipping for Prime members, which is additional cost, but that we have. We called it a wash on that, too.

We have been members of Amazon Prime for a number of years now. Amazon is convenient and has good prices. So, when Lorena returned from IKEA a couple of weeks ago, disappointed by what she believed were low quality offerings at not such great prices, we decided to buy a bed from Amazon. We found something that would just fit the bill: A Tokyo Bronze Queen Size Metal Bed and a Slumber 1 – 8″ Mattress-in-a-Box. I had heard that Walmart was upping there game in online sales to compete with Amazon, so on a whim, I checked out Walmart’s offering. Here is what I found:

Walmart: $296.17 with Free Shipping
Amazon: $339.14 with Free shipping for the mattress and “free” shipping with Amazon Prime membership for the bed

That “free” shipping thing with Amazon Prime membership always seemed like an oxymoron to me. The Amazon Prime membership costs money so the shipping is really not free. We have Amazon prime so the shipping only cost a little more for the Amazon order. Nevertheless, we would have had to pay a 12+ percent premium for the privilege the bed from Amazon. That is a privilege I am not really interested in exercising.

It all arrived today and we were very happy with the quality of the product when we got it put together. This whole turn of events reminded me that I never want to be a single source shopper. I am never going to buy anything from Amazon again without checking Walmart online first. The reality is I will probably check Walmart first going forward.