Seattle Specials & Sales

Satte Rabatte -25%  Rabatt Sammler bis zu -20% auf Wein, Schaumwein und Spirituosen

This is the heading of my latest email from Vienna this morning about a “Special” running “Am Freitag, 13. Dezember und Samstag , 14. Dezember 2013”. Unfortunately, I am in Seattle at the moment so I cannot take advantage of this weekend’s offer from BILLA to stock up on wine and spirits before Christmas. I should add that, as I am a member of BILLA, I could even take advantage of the additional reduction of 20%.

In addition, BILLA has tasting sessions on Saturday – another reason that I would definitely be there today if I were in Vienna! This time last year a nice man offered me a full glass of ‘Blue Label’ whisky. “Nobody wants to try it!”, he explained. I later found out that a bottle plus the high EU VAT came to over two hundred US dollars!!

My first purchase in post-Christmas sales in London was a beautiful Crombie overcoat which was stolen by a “snatch and run” artist in the first restaurant in which I hung it up. Before this, I also had a vacation job in Selfridges selling silk so I knew the way these sales were organised. The seconds crockery sale was particularly successful. Selfridges had the lion’s share of the seconds because it sold so much full price crockery during the year.

I notice that Vienna shops will simply reduce prices on all their entire stock (at least the stock they are prepared to leave in the shop during the sales period) by as much as 70%. People stream into Vienna especially to Mariahilfer Straße to get these specials. In London these days, they tend to import special stock to sell during the sales period. But there are still good deals to be found by those who are early shoppers. In the USA on the day following Thanksgiving, the “Black Friday” sales offer what seems to be extraordinary value; so extraordinary that people camp overnight outside certain shops in sub-zero temperatures.

Two weeks ago on ‘Black Friday’ and the following weekend. Wal Mart was selling the very latest model of the iPhone for $45 with a cash back of $75!!! When I investigated this offer at 8am on ‘Black Friday’, it turned out that this generous ‘cash back’ had to be spent on a year’s subscription to Verizon.

I always try to take advantage of such sales. Probably the best “Outdoor” shop in Brisbane Australia – similar to REI in the USA – is Kathmandu where I bought my wonderful Rumanian mountaineering boots. But I bought them in December when they sell everything at 50% off the normal price. After Christmas, they increase this reduction to 60%. The following year I bought my heavy duty travel gear during December. Why buy at any other time? REI does things a little differently, giving dividends to their customers and sometimes a free gift with certain purchases.

ALDI does things in completely different manner. They offer specials each week starting on a certain days. They are usually have a different theme each week. In Noosa Heads, Australia the best specials are gone within five minutes of the opening time after people have sometimes been in line for up to an hour. The Brisbane stores specials last a little longer so I now have an Australian kitchen completely equipped with specials from ALDI. In Vienna, I bought all my warm clothes from ALDI including snow boots which cost one sixth of the price in nearby shops.

As in the example above, BILLA is different again. If you sign up with BILLA, they give you specials varying from item to item all the time. But each week on certain days they offer 25% on a certain range of stock. This week BILLA members will get a huge 40% off wine and spirits as mentioned at the beginning. This is particularly good if we go to the two signature stores in the centre of Vienna and near the Opera where they have an great range of plonk. In Italy, BILLA does incredibly low piece specials on chunks of Reggione cheese. They also do give-away prices on Gorganzola in Venice but, if you look as though you are about to buy it, a local Venetian will immediately tell you “High Cholesterol!! don’t buy that!!”.

Nowadays, specials are everywhere. When I was in Colchester, England recently I found that buying a rail ticket needed some negotiation skills. I managed to get the ticket price down to one third of the initial price then said, “Surely you can do better than that?” to which the ticket seller replied, “I can’t do better than that but, if you go to the other ticket office, you may get a better price”. I did go to the other ticket office and I did get a better price! I should mention that I was negotiating a ticket price for a later date. If you want to buy on the day of travel, you usually have to pay full price.

Talking of rail travel reminds me of buying a ticket in Leipzig. I had taken the precaution of searching the really fine DB website for the particular ticket I needed. I found an incredibly low price for the ticket I needed. I went to the ticket office and was given a price far above the one I had found. I protested and gave the ticket seller instructions on how to find the price I wanted. “Ah!! There it is!!!” he said and I walked away a very happy camper!!

There are now many internet brokers for travel and accommodation and some like ‘Travelzoo’ will simply point you towards the best deals in each country. This saves a lot of time searching for specials.

One Travelzoo special I took up was for the executive floor of a five star hotel in Budapest. This had all sorts of hot baths and orchestras were playing each evening. A group of English security experts had also taken up this offer. They managed to drink the hotel completely out of Hungarian beer and had to start on the (better in my opinion) Czech beer. when I asked them if there were actually security cameras on every London street, they cheered and shouted, “We hope so!!!”.

There are also many good deals to be had in the area of entertainment. For example, the Seattle Symphony Orchestra has recently been advertising very good “deals” for some of their tickets including a number of offers through Travelzoo. I have also seen a number of offers of cheap tickets to concerts given by the Brisbane based Queensland Symphony Orchestra. But these were made to members of the RACQ, the equivalent of the AAA in the USA. Papering a theatre is also a very serious business so often free tickets are available at short notice to certain people.

Of course, I haven’t even started to work through the pile of discount vouchers in the kitchen and discount emails which have arrived today. Specials are everywhere!!!