Martin Geisler Online

Yesterday Stéphanie and I went shopping for some new hardware — the kind of hardware you have in the kitchen and bathroom, that is :-)

We went to Elgiganten and Electric City, two big malls with all sorts of electric equipment. The nice thing about the two shops is that they lie beside each other, so we could walk back and forth and compare prices and specs. And we ended up going back and forth a lot…

We started in Electric City where we picked a washing machine, a condenser tumble dryer, a refrigerator, and a dish washer that we liked. We then walked to Elgiganten and compared prices, and came to the conclusion that Electric City was slightly cheaper. So we went back there and looked some more at the stuff, now with the things from Elgiganten in the back of our minds. There we managed to agree on the four machines we need (after I almost drove Stéphanie crazy by spending 15 minutes on picking a refrigerator) and went to talk with the clerk about how it should be delivered.

But the clerk told us that we could not have the stuff delivered on March 1st since Electric City had been sold to Elgiganten, and the shop would close on February 24th! At that point their remaining stock would be taken over by Elgiganten, but there was no way for us to pay for the things now and then have Elgiganten deliver them later… Aargh! All that walking back and forth had been for nothing…

So back to Elgiganten to look some more. The salesman recognized us from the first visit and now that we sort of knew what we wanted we figured that we might as well let him find the stuff for us. Since we were buying so many things we wanted them to be cheap, but the salesman was sort of hesitant to recommend the cheap labels. He would rather sell us a Whirlpool, Siemens, AEG, or Bosh machine than one from Candy or Indicit.

When he realized that we really didn’t want to pay (much) more to get the good brands, he started offering us discounts! So we could get a refrigerator from Whirlpool together with a dish washer from Siemens with a 10% discount! That was in addition to the discount that had already been given to those things. This way we got a refrigerator and dish washer that makes much less noise than the cheaper ones.

As for the washing machine and dryer the salesman wanted to put together a set, but we ended up buying a combined model and saved some money again. Of course the salesman was a bit worried about us buying such a cheap model, so he offered a five year insurance for 500 DKK (instead of 650 DKK). We bought the insurance and so he could reclaim some of the earlier discount :-) But on the other hand — if something breaks in the little machine, then it would cost at least 500 DKK just to have a repairman to show up.

So now Stéphanie and I have all the appliances for our new home. I’m really looking forward to start using them!