Black Friday and Cyber Monday may have passed but one northern Illinois expert said it’s not too late for consumers to save during the holidays.
Tim Michaelis is an assistant professor of entrepreneurship at Northern Illinois University. He said the desire to save money when buying things does not always mean that the person is cheap. They may just be frugal.
“And so, a cheap person is only thinking about price, you know, ‘how can I get the lowest price regardless of how much happiness it brings me,” he said, “or how much utility or use it brings out of the product that you're buying.”
He said a frugal person does research before they make a purchase, focusing on the best price while thinking about the product’s quality. He shared a few tools that will help these types of shoppers.
“Consumer Reports is really helpful,” he explained. “There's a kind of a blog that just got purchased by [The] New York Times called wirecutter. And that does a lot of good product reviews to kind of give you a range of what are the best high quality, you know, the best value products you can buy for Christmas.”
He also suggested using a website called CamelCamelCamel.com. This tracks Amazon price histories. Users can keep a list and decide the best time to buy based on the trends they see.
Michaelis said there are usually deals on Black Friday, but he said buyers should take caution.
“And a lot of the times the products that you get on Black Friday are made specifically at a lower quality to sell at a lower price on Black Friday,” he shared. “And you don't know that unless you look at the actual item numbers, and you go to make sure they're actual real, you know, items that are sold throughout the year.”
Michaelis said another way to save money is to swap out gift exchanges with spending time with friends and family.
“I talked to my brother and my parents was like, ‘you know, we don't need to do gifts this year,” he explained, “we could just hang out, watch a movie, make some food together. That's what we really wanted.”
He said this may not be ideal for everyone but thinks that more people should discuss this option.
- Yvonne Boose is a current corps member for Report for America, an initiative of the GroundTruth Project. It's a national service program that places talented journalists in local newsrooms like WNIJ. You can learn more about Report for America at wnij.org.
