Black Belt Shopper
(featured column)

Local Shopping Experts
by Larry Wiener

If you live in Los Angeles and are furnishing a house on a budget, you can visit the Hotel Surplus Outlet at 3175 E. Washington Blvd. and find high quality used furniture made available by hotels that are redecorating.

If you live in the Minneapolis area, you can go to go to any one of a number of the branches of Plato’s Closet, a consignment store that specializes in teen apparel.

What these two resources have in common is that both of them came to my attention through the offerings of local shopping experts - the Hotel Surplus Outlet through Alan Mendelson on K-CAL Channel 9 and Plato’s Closet through John Ewoldt, who writes a column each Thursday in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Most medium to large cities have local shopping experts who comb the community and publish their findings in some local media. Some have radio shows while others publish in newspapers. Most of them have an online component.

Local shopping experts can add to the black belt shopping resources you gain from BetterBudgeting.com. While a column like mine call tell you about dollar stores, shopping strategies, and national closeout stores, local experts can tell you where the bargains are in their areas.

In some of the largest metropolitan areas, local shopping experts even specialize in one type of bargain hunting or another. Here in Los Angeles, for example, Geri Cook has a radio show once a week that features very upscale bargains.

Some of these local experts even publish books. A search of amazon.com, for example, revealed two books on bargain hunting in New York. A book called Buying Retail Is Stupid has not only a national edition, but special editions for Los Angeles and Chicago.

So how do you find these local shopping experts? Using a search engine is probably the best way to start. Just to see what I’d find, I searched for Sacramento, bargain, bargains, shopping. One site that came up was Digital City Sacramento. Through following a series of links, I found Mother Goose Store which offers gently used baby goods.

A similar search in Seattle got me to a newspaper column that featured, among other offerings, Dixon’s New and Used furniture which is described as the true friend of an urbanite on a budget.

Besides the web, you can probably find the offerings of local shopping experts by contacting local radio or TV stations, looking in your newspaper, or asking some of your friends who are good at shopping.

It’s been said that retailing has gotten so nationalized that if you are blindfolded and put in a mall anywhere in the country, you won’t know where you are unless you look at a newspaper stand because the malls are all the same.

That may be true for malls, but there still are a host of local shopping outlets that offer bargains to black belt shoppers.

*  *  *

Copyright © 2002 by Larry Wiener