Elite Deals is a website that offers people products to try at a huge discount, often only $1-2 for an item that sells from $10-$20 or more dollars. Most of the items I have found are either health/beauty related or they are for cellphones and other tech gadgets; but there are also things for the house. Besides different lotions and vitamins, we have bought one of those little spiralizers that turns veggies into pasta. They also have clothes and other items that are at a good reduction, but not any better than just being on sale would be. They have new items all of the time, but most of the really good deals are taken right away. And they only offer so many of the items per day. Anyway, the reason that they do this, is to get people to try the product and leave a review on Amazon, so once you try the product, then you write a review of why you did or did not like the product. I started a thread about this in February, when I first learned about it, and you can find out more about it by reading the thread, and the link to sign up is there also. You will neeed to have an Amazon account (Prime is best-free shipping), and a Facebook page. http://www.seniorsonly.club/threads/great-website-for-testing-products.2688/#post-44325
I like shopping online. I get tired of poor service. Not everyplace has poor service but some do. I figure if the person filling my order is a jerk, at least I'll never know. I know we should support stores but I try to buy natural cosmetics and lotions etc. I can get them so much cheaper online than at the local health food store. It's usually easy to get to the 50 dollars and then free ship.
It's interesting that, with brick-and-mortar stores being seriously threatened by online shopping, some of them do almost nothing to make their case. For example, the True Value hardware store in town closes at 4:00 pm on weekdays and is open only until noon on Saturday. True Value is where people would go to buy tools and hardware when they are doing home improvement projects, whether it involves plumbing, electrical, woodworking, painting, or gardening, yet anyone with a day job would have to get there between 8:00 am and noon on Saturday. Yet evenings and, more particularly, weekends are the time when people most need the stuff they sell at True Value. We have one other hardware store in town that's open a little later at night, on weekends, and all day on Saturday, but although they sell retail, they deal mostly with contractors. Since our house was thrashed when we bought it, and we were converting it from a three-unit apartment building to a single-family home, we spent a lot of money on stuff that was available locally, but if I wanted something on a weekend, I had to drive seventy miles to Bangor. I stopped at the other hardware store once, shortly after we moved in here. I don't remember what I was looking for but I didn't know the name of it, although I would have recognized it if I saw it on the shelves. The owner asked what I was looking for, then when I tried to explain that I'd know if if I saw it, but that I didn't know what it was called, he said, "Well, if you don't even know what you're looking for, you're wasting your time here." So I'd rather drive to Bangor than go there. Far too many businesses around here also make a habit of not keeping regular hours. For example, if the signs says that they are open until 4:00, they might close early if no one is in the store at 3:00, and that drives me crazy. There is an auto repair place just a few blocks from my house. It used to be a Chevrolet dealership, but they lost their dealership along with a lot of other Chevy dealerships a few years ago, so they've been surviving on their service and parts departments alone. Yet, while they have their hours posted on the door, the two times that I have tried to bring my car there, they were closed, although they were supposed to have been open. In California, when a restaurant's hours said that it was open until 11:00 pm, it meant that they wouldn't take any more orders after 11:00 pm; you could walk in at 10:45 and order something to eat. Here, that means that they plan on closing the doors at that time. When they are scheduled to serve breakfast until 11:00 am, they might close down breakfast orders at 10:30 if they feel like it. It drives me nuts.
At least your hardware store is open prt of the day on Saturday, @Ken Anderson . We have a hometown hardware store that has been here forever, and they close at 4PM every day, too, and are not open on weekends at all. Apparently, most of their business is for contractors, just like yours is; but if they actually stayed open on weekends, or even after 4PM, they would probably have more business from people who needed something from a hardware store. We can go to Lowes; but it is always busy on weekends, so we try to make any trips to Lowes during the week when they are not as busy. I think that the restaurants are mostly okay for staying open as long as they aree supposed to, but one time, we went into a fish and chips place that was supposed to be open until 10PM, and by 8, they had already put away all of the tartar sauce and other condiments. We were not real happy with that ! Also, ome stores won't sell you an item if the PLU number is not there, even when the item is plainly marked as to the price. We went to Walmart to get one of those soaker hoses, and when i got to the checkout tand, she said she couldn't sell it because it didn't have the PLU, and it was the last one in stock. We ended up having to stand in line at customer service for 15 extra minutes in order to get the hose, even though the price was marked right on the wrapping label.