How to negotiate with stores like Best Buy and Circuit City

When you enter the store head over to the section of the store that carries the item(s) that you wish to buy. If it's slow, you should be greeted fairly quickly by a sales person, but before that happens, try to get an understanding of which products they have that are also on your list and how the price compares to the prices that you listed as well. This will help you determine how far down you need to negotiate.

There are also going to be two more points of negotiation to help you increase the overall value of your product; the service plan and installation plan. Purchasing these two things will help you lower the overall price that you negotiate on your items. The reason for this is that managers need to fulfill 3 diffferent buckets on a monthly basis;Sales of Products, Sales of Service Plans, and Sales of Installations. Because it is harder for them to sell the last two in the list, they will often drop the price on an item by the full amount of the service plan or installation just so that they can add one of these items to their bucket. You still have to spend the same amount of money, but now your purchase is covered by the service plan for the same price.

When the sales person approaches you, they will most likely as one of two questions:

How can I help you today?

or

Are you interested in buying 'X' today?

Tell the sales person that you are interested in buying 'X' today (let them know all of your items by type, TV, Speakers, etc.) as long as they are willing to give you the best deal. They will often follow up by telling you that they can make you the best deal and then ask what you which models you are interested in. If you have multiple models that you are interested in, point them out and ask which model they can offer you the best deal on. If they point to the price tags and go straight to the lowest priced item then it's time to start referencing your printouts. Show them the prices that you found on each item and tell them that you would be interested in buying from them if they are willing to beat the price.

If the sales guy is not willing to negotiate with you, ask for a manager. It could be that the sales person doesn't have the authority to negotiate or even knows that he can negotiate.

If the manager isn't willing to negotiate on the price at first, ask him what he can offer you to get you to buy from him versus going to a different store. If you're buying multiple products, it may be that he can't lower the price on the intitial product, but he can on the other products. For example, when I purchased my HDTV from Best Buy I was able to get the manager to take $100 of a PS3 (normally $399), $50 off a Denon receiver (normally $350), and $50 off the wall mount (normally $150) for the TV just by asking the question of how he can pursuade me to buy the TV from him veruss a competitor. When I agreed to that $200 savings he then started ringing up the purchase order. Upon doing this he noticed that the TV was not in stock; good news for me! I then used this to act like I had become irritated and said, "Well that's too bad. I guess I'll need to go down the street to Circuit City because I really want to have this installed tomorrow." The manager, fearing that he was going to lose the sale then offered to throw in free delivery ($100) and setup (on a stand, which I didn't need because it's going on my wall) and a free 4 year service plan ($249) if I let him deliver it on Monday. He also threw in a free HDMI cable ($65). So, now I'm up to a $615 savings on a roughly $3,000 purchase, just over 20% savings,bringing my cost down to $2,400. I also purchased an HD TiVo if you're trying to tally the numbers in your head.

One of the things that I noticed when they rang up my order is that they did not give me a $0 price on the service plan and delivery charges, instead they took the total off the price of the TV. So, instead of the TV price showing $1299, it shows as $849 for a 50 inch plasma! I later learned that this is because the manager needs to fulfill his delivery and service plan buckets and wants all the revenue to fall in those buckets, not in the product sales bucket.

It turns out that Best Buy did not carry any of the brand of speakers that I was looking for. Because of this and my success at negotiating the price down over $600, I decided to head over to Circuit City to see what I could get them to do for a deal on the speakers.



Heading over to Circuit City I knew I had to play this one correctly because they were the only local store in the area that had the speakers that I wanted in stock, but I knew they had their speakers priced $50 per pair more than Frys.com and several other online stores. I got to Circuit City and headed over to the in-wall speaker department. Sure enough, they had the 4 pairs of round Polk Audio speakers I was looking for, the one pair of rectangle Polk Audio speakers, and the few sub woofers that I was still trying to decide on. One problem though, it appears that I didn't have the printout for the round speakers. Because of this, I pulled up Frys.com on my cell phone and navigated to the page that showed their online price.

Right after doing this I was lucky enough to get greeted by one of the managers asking if they can help me. I responded with, "Yes you can. I'd like to buy 4 pairs of these speakers from you at $99.99 a pair instead of your marked price of $149.99 a pair. You see here on Frys.com they have them listed for $99.99 a pair (showing him my cell phone) and I'd prefer to buy them from you since I'm already here,instead of driving over there." He looked at me and said, "Sure, I cando that." Easy as that! I wasn't done yet.

I then told him that
I wanted to buy a pair of the rectangular speakers, but wanted to know if he would be able to give me a deal on a subwoofer if I did buy themfrom him. He then said that it depended on which model, but we could probably work something out. I then showed him a Velodyne subwoofer that I wanted that they happened to have on clearance for $179 (normally $350). He checked on that model and found that it was not instock (again, good for me!). So I then asked him if the floor modelworked. He showed me that it did. Then I asked if he would sell me the floor model. He then agreed to do that and said that he would
could take $30 off of the price. I said "Great. Will you drop the price even more if I buy a service plan for that speaker?" He then said he would drop it another $30 if I agreed to buy the 10 yearservice plan for $40, thus providing me the service plan for just $10! So, if anything happens to my speaker in 10 years, I get a new one for free!

In just a few minutes I was able to negotiate 4 pairs of speakers (normally $600) for $400 and a subwoofer (Normally$350, marked at $179) for $149 and a 10 year service plan (normally $40) for $10. That's a total savings of $260 (if you don't count the difference between the clearance price and marked price), bringing my total down from $1010 to $750 before tax! That's nearly $900 in savings just for doing a little preparation and asking for the price I wanted.

Before you go make your next big purchase, make sure you prepare yourself to get the best deal possible! By the way, this also works even better if you can find a "Mom and Pop" store to negotiate with since they are more likely to be more threatened by stores like Circuit City and Best Buy.