Haggling in the High Street

Scots_quine

Scots_quine

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I'm thinking of buying a new lens. Jessops have it in but it is £30 dearer than in Warehouse Express. Has anyone tried haggling in a High Street shop? Do you think they will come any closer to the internet price?
 
Jessops used to pricematch WEX, not sure if they do any more though,nowadays it's usually just local stores they match with. Jacobs on the other hand, if you happen to be going into Edinburgh or Glasgow, will match/beat the prices on camerapricebuster, or at least they did for me a couple of weeks back.
 
Scots_quine said:
I'm thinking of buying a new lens. Jessops have it in but it is £30 dearer than in Warehouse Express. Has anyone tried haggling in a High Street shop? Do you think they will come any closer to the internet price?
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I used to haggle all the time with jessops back in the 80s, like one time I went in to buy a camera + kit lens, and didn't realise that the price shown was for the body only, so managed to haggle them to £10 for the kit lens.

Do they accept it today? Probably not, but you're not really likely to lose anything if you try, just tell them that you're torn because you can get it cheaper online, but would like to buy it today. They'll probably try and help get you to walk out their store with it somehow, even if it's not a 100% price match, you might be less bummed out by a £15 or £10 difference+wait.
 
Also worth seeing if you can get useful accessories instead of a straight discount. Sometimes that is more fruitful.

You can see why shops are struggling as there is no way they can compete with internet only channels.
 
I had success earlier this year when I made a big purchase with them. Buying D7000, 2 lenses and a UV filter they were willing to come within a couple of pounds of Internet prices.

Definitely worth a try. You've nothing to lose.
 
srichards said:
Also worth seeing if you can get useful accessories instead of a straight discount. Sometimes that is more fruitful.

You can see why shops are struggling as there is no way they can compete with internet only channels.
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Yeah they'll probably offer you a great deal on a UV filter :bonk:
 
Strappy said:
They did for me on a Nikon 70-300mm about 3 years ago, though they did add the cheapest P&P cost to the price of the lens and matched that, which I thought was fair. There's no harm in asking.
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In Glasgow they changed their policy so that they only price-matched with stores within a certain distance. I'm sure it was a coincidence that the only other camera store within the prescribed area was another branch of Jessops :suspect::lol:

No idea what they do now that Jacobs have opened up halfway between the two branches....
 
When I bought my D90,Best Buy matched the cheapest internet price, but when I went in yesterday to get a memory card the very knowledgeable yound lady who served me said they had stopped matching internet prices due to the fact that although it resulted in many more customers it had lost them money, ( I didn't say that I had posted the fact on here)
They are however still price matching any other retailer in the country, so it is still better than Jessops who only match within a certain radius of their shops.
I still managed to get an 8GB Lexar SDHC class 6 card for £12.99 which I thought was prettty impressive, ( they were marked up at £29.00)
 
Them as don't ask.....don't get
 
Most of us retailers would like to be able to discount prices but are normally tied by the company we work for. Unfortunately the bigger the company the less likely you are to get a result. Most, if not all, businesses now will price match but not against Internet only stores as they don't have the overheads that we do.
Give it a go by all means but ask yourself what sort of answer you would get if you rocked up at the checkouts in Tesco with £150 of shopping and offered them £100 :)
 
Phil1974 said:
Give it a go by all means but ask yourself what sort of answer you would get if you rocked up at the checkouts in Tesco with £150 of shopping and offered them £100 :)
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They'll say no, just like any other retailer can. You're perfectly within your rights to make an offer at a supermarket and they're within their's to refuse it.

Now, if you could direct me to a camera retailer who'll price match and pay me the difference back like Asda do... ;)
 
O ly advice with jessops is to make you're getting a new item. Many ti es I've been 'offered' a used/ex-display item as new,even to the point of buying a sealed boxed body from them and it had a jessops CF card in with shots of the local store. BUT it was sealed!
 
Not gonna happen. Unless you're really lucky.

I recently bought a 1.8 Nifty Fifty and tried at Jessops, Jacobs, currys, PC World and a local (Nottingham) camera store to get an internet price match and they were having none of it.
They were happy to match high street prices however, i.e Jessops would match Jacobs' £90 by knocking a fiver off of their £95 price tag.

I hear Best Buy match internet prices from well known sites such as Amazon though, so that may be worth a try!
 
CarlosGilbertos said:
Not gonna happen. Unless you're really lucky.

I recently bought a 1.8 Nifty Fifty and tried at Jessops, Jacobs, currys, PC World and a local (Nottingham) camera store to get an internet price match and they were having none of it.
They were happy to match high street prices however, i.e Jessops would match Jacobs' £90 by knocking a fiver off of their £95 price tag.

I hear Best Buy match internet prices from well known sites such as Amazon though, so that may be worth a try!
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My local Best Buy have stopped matching internet prices so I would imagine it is the same for all their stores, see my earlier post however.
 
CarlosGilbertos said:
Not gonna happen. Unless you're really lucky.

I recently bought a 1.8 Nifty Fifty and tried at Jessops, Jacobs, currys, PC World and a local (Nottingham) camera store to get an internet price match and they were having none of it.
They were happy to match high street prices however, i.e Jessops would match Jacobs' £90 by knocking a fiver off of their £95 price tag.

I hear Best Buy match internet prices from well known sites such as Amazon though, so that may be worth a try!
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I think it will depend on the price of the lens the OP wants to buy to be honest. If it is a £1000 lens then he may get a little bit of movement on the price as there will be some margin to absorb it.

There will be very little profit margin on a nifty fifty, so you aren't likely to get anywhere much haggling. You did well to get £5 off IMO.
 
ChrisJ_SLH said:
I think it will depend on the price of the lens the OP wants to buy to be honest. If it is a £1000 lens then he may get a little bit of movement on the price as there will be some margin to absorb it.

There will be very little profit margin on a nifty fifty, so you aren't likely to get anywhere much haggling. You did well to get £5 off IMO.
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Fair point :)

What lens were you looking at getting OP?
 
last weekend i tried getting jessops to honour their current offer of beating the price of any store. Cameraworld had the nikon sb700 for £210 so i pointed that out to some jesspos monkey, he went away to consult with someone in a backroom, came back after 10 minutes and gave a lame excuse as to why they wouldnt match the price. Claimed that the camera world item was a "package" item so didnt qualify. He had trouble defining what he meant by a package item though.

Big card on most surfaces they had available saying they would match and beat ANY price so long as the store currently had stock, no get out clauses mentioned or anything else. So knickers to em, it wasnt worth wasting time arguing with the guy so i went and got it at camera world. If they wont even honour their own offers then theres no chance of a straight forward haggle.
 
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If the shelf price ends in 99p, then it's always worth haggling for consumer goods.. if it ends in 98p (special offer) or 97p (managers clearance) then you're less and less likely to get anything further off. At least, that used to be the quick way for the staff to identify at a glance whether or not an item was already discounted - not sure if Jessops use the same code.
 
Alastair said:
If the shelf price ends in 99p, then it's always worth haggling for consumer goods.. if it ends in 98p (special offer) or 97p (managers clearance) then you're less and less likely to get anything further off. At least, that used to be the quick way for the staff to identify at a glance whether or not an item was already discounted - not sure if Jessops use the same code.
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That used to be a pretty good rule of thumb but since the vat changes in the last couple of years that's not always the way. All 99p goods went up to £1.01 etc so now you have a whole range of pricing. At least we do in my store.
 
In my experience most of the big chains won't budge a penny on price, however, a bit of digging on the net can come up with some discount codes.
I got 20% off my camera from crrys just by writing down a number.
 
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