Clark's Big Book of Bargains (30 page)

• Tips on Smoke Detectors •

• If you have a burglar alarm in your house, get a smoke alarm that’s integrated into the burglar alarm system.
  

• If you don’t have a burglar alarm, throw out your old smoke detectors and install the new lithium battery-powered smoke detectors that last for ten years. They cost less than $10 each.
  

• Clean the lint screen and exhaust pipe for your clothes dryer, and move papers away from it. The dryer is a prime place for fires to start.
  

• Keep fire extinguishers in your laundry room and kitchen.
  

* FURNITURE *

The furniture business always has been controlled by local or regional chains, and people generally have purchased their furniture from one of a few stores that advertise heavily in their area. But now consumers have the ability to price shop, via the Internet, furniture sold by retailers who are reaching outside their traditional market, and that’s making an enormous difference. One such retailer, the largest in the nation, is Warren Buffett’s Nebraska Furniture Mart (www.nebraskafurnituremart.com). Another is Gallery Furniture (www.galleryfurniture.com) in Houston.

More and more, instead of buying from a furniture retailer a few minutes from home, people are driving as long as a day to a high-volume furniture outlet. Nebraska Furniture Mart has become famous in Omaha and is opening a second location in Kansas City, where people across the Midwest buy furniture at what they perceive to be really good prices. Another furniture seller that’s become a magnet for shoppers is IKEA, which sells Scandinavian-style furniture at low prices. IKEA stores are mostly on the East and West coasts of the United States. You can find a list of IKEA store locations at www.ikea.com, but you can’t buy online, and the site isn’t very friendly or navigable.

So many people drive great distances to shop at IKEA that it’s not unusual to find a number of new motels near IKEA stores. People show up with trucks, spend the night, and start shopping at IKEA the next morning. They load up the truck and take their furniture home. IKEA also has a mail-order program, but it’s not cost-competitive with IKEA stores.

Costco is expanding its role in furniture sales. It’s opening a furniture store called Furniture Only in the Pacific Northwest, and selling more and more furniture (including upholstered furniture) in all its stores. Costco has two primary furniture events a year: one that starts just before Christmas, and another in mid-July. And the furniture Costco sells is a tremendous deal—excellent quality at very low prices. Costco marks up its furniture no more than 9 percent above its cost, compared to the 100 percent markup you’ll find at most furniture stores. If Costco pays $500 for a piece, it sells for $545 instead of the $1,000 a traditional furniture store would charge. We have Costco furniture throughout our house.

Costco doesn’t deliver it for you, but at those prices, you can afford to rent a truck and pick it up. You buy it and Costco sets it aside for you. Then you rent a truck and take it home. During the furniture events, there’s an area near the pharmacy where you see piece after piece of sold furniture waiting to be picked up.

Another thing you won’t find at Costco is what I call No-No-No plans. Those are the financing plans furniture stores use to drive most furniture sales. Furniture stores don’t advertise the quality of their furniture, just their No-No-No plans, which means they charge no interest, no down payment, and no payments until January two years from now. People have become completely obsessed with these plans, and the idea of furnishing an entire room or an entire house without having to pay for it. Buyers think it’s free money, but the reality is No-No-No plans can be dangerously expensive, because people often fail to pay in full before the date that the No-No-No payment holiday ends. If you don’t pay in full by the day the grace period ends, you get clobbered. The store charges you interest retroactive on the entire balance to the day of purchase—usually at an interest rate of 20 percent or more. That would be a staggering amount of money. If you buy something on a No-No-No plan and you are nearing the date to pay in full, and you can’t make the payment, you should do anything you have to to come up with the money. I don’t care if you have to take a cash advance on your credit card. One of the tricks they use is that the payment due date may not match up with the date the No-No-No ends, so you think you’ve paid it in time, but that could be a week or two after the trigger date. Make sure you keep a record of the actual date your payment holiday ends, and send in your payment by FedEx, UPS, or certified mail, to make sure you get it there in time. Do not trust regular mail with this. Period. No exceptions.

People use these plans because furniture is expensive, and because they want a lot at one time. My philosophy about furniture is different from what is common today. I buy one piece of furniture at a time, rather than a set of furniture. So I might buy a bed or a dresser. Later, I might buy another piece that complements the earlier purchase, but doesn’t exactly match it. That’s the way people used to buy furniture, and if you look in the home of an older relative, you’ll see that the pieces complement each other but don’t exactly match. That’s also true in high-end homes. The idea of having pieces that all match is a modern one, driven by marketing and the fact that people don’t trust themselves to make good choices.

It’s much easier to come up with $700 or $800 for one piece of furniture than $7,000 or $8,000 for a set. Instead, people today put themselves deep into debt to buy a room full of furniture.

It’s best to buy furniture that you can see and take with you. But sometimes furniture is delivered to you from a warehouse, or people elect to custom-order a piece with a particular fabric. If you aren’t going to take the furniture with you, pay by credit card, not by cash, check, or debit card. Furniture stores close all the time, even well-known stores, and if you pay by cash, check, or debit card, you could lose your money and not get your furniture. I’ve talked with a lot of people over the years who’ve lost money this way. It happens over and over again. If you pay by credit card and don’t receive the merchandise, just do a chargeback within 60 days, and you’ll receive a refund from your credit card company.

In the carpet section, I told you about buying carpet inexpensively in Dalton, Georgia, the carpet capital of the world. There’s a parallel in furniture: North Carolina, where a lot of furniture is manufactured. The North Carolina furniture stores, because they’re close to the manufacturers, can buy furniture for less. But just as with carpet, buying in the back room and finding a one-of-a-kind item will be much cheaper than simply ordering furniture from a North Carolina store.

Unfortunately, over the years I’ve heard more complaints from listeners who bought furniture in North Carolina than virtually any other consumer purchase that people make. Sometimes I’ll hear from someone who bought from a place that went bust or they bought from a place that was supposed to deliver the furniture, but the delivery was delayed. The most common problem is that the furniture shows up damaged, and nobody accepts responsibility. The store says they gave good furniture to the company that delivered the merchandise and the carrier blames the store. It’s almost impossible to resolve.

When furniture is damaged on the way to a furniture store, the retailer refuses delivery and the manufacturer doesn’t want it back. So it goes to a furniture jobber, which expertly repairs it and puts it up for sale, usually in the jobber’s own liquidation facility. You can find furniture jobbers at flea markets, antique stores, and galleries. Ask a dealer at a flea market or the owner of an antique store for names. You might also find scratch-and-dent damaged furniture at the outlet center of a furniture retailer.

A great way to save money on furniture, and we do this all the time, is to buy it used. What we don’t buy at Costco or one of the other warehouse clubs, we buy used, and we have more used furniture than anything else. A lot of people are uncomfortable with the idea of buying used furniture, but buying used gives you the chance to save money and buy a much better piece of furniture. Furniture depreciates even faster than a new car when it’s driven off the lot, so a used piece is a lot cheaper than new. We furnished our entire five-bedroom beach house in Florida for just $3,000. If you buy used, you might pay $200 for a dresser, $50 for a night stand, $100 for a headboard. Our dining-room table at the beach house was $200, including four chairs.

A lot of cities have furniture antique markets where you can find used furniture once a month. Although they’re called antique markets, a lot of the stuff is just used. An antique ultimately becomes a very expensive item, while a used piece is just a deal. It’s easy to tell the difference. An antique bookcase might cost $4,000, while a used bookcase might cost $75. Our dining-room table at home is magnificent. It’s a traditional mahogany table with eight English ball-and-claw chairs. It easily would have cost $10,000 new and we bought it at one of the antique markets for $1,400. That’s still a lot of money, but it’s such a high-quality piece that it will last for generations.

Another way to buy good used furniture is at estate or moving sales, or from people who are redecorating. Check your local classified ads or free local advertising sheets, which some people know as the
Pennysaver,
to see what’s available.

In mountain and beach resort communities, where there are a large number of second homes, there is an abundance of barely used furniture. Someone sells a property and the buyer doesn’t want the furniture, so it goes to secondhand furniture shops. It’s high-end stuff, because people who can afford to own a second home often have very nice furniture in it. And it sells very inexpensively.

One of the ways furniture stores try to get you to spend more is to sell you fabric protection plans. Don’t buy them. In the manufacturing of upholstered furniture, manufacturers treat the fabric with protectant. The furniture store is just trying to pad its profit.

Ordering custom-made furniture also is a bad idea. Anytime you get into custom-made furniture, you create complexity, delays, higher costs, and customer-service problems. That’s especially true for sofas.