A Book Shopping Revelation

For the past few weeks I have been looking at a couple of books each time I go to Barnes and Noble. Since I really hate to pay retail for anything, I have been waiting to get a coupon which B & N regularly sends to my email inbox so I could at least save a little off the price of the books. Yesterday I finally got a coupon in my email which would have taken 10% off the retail price of the books. That was OK, but since one of the books was $60 (a college-level Japanese language text which I want to use to refresh my language skills before we go to Japan in the fall), that would still only save me $6 which is about the cost of tax. However, I really wanted the book, so I was ready to splurge but alas I was pretty lazy yesterday and didn't feel like driving to the mall so I went online to B&N thinking I would purchase the book there. To my surprise, the book that cost $60 in the store only cost $45 online! Maybe everyone else knows about this pricing thing--go to the store, pay much more? But it was a surprise to me. Then it got me to thinking that maybe I could find the book for even less somewhere else online so I Googled the title and was even more surprised when the book came up for $40 at Amazon. With free shipping! I thought I would push my luck even more and Googled 'Amazon promo codes and coupons' but none of the coupons I found would work for the books I wanted. Oh well...I ended up getting both books for a total of $46 with free shipping and they should be here in a couple of days. Now I'm a happy camper with an extra $30 in my pocket. The moral of this post is that if you are willing to spend your hard-earned money on something, it pays to shop around instead of just going to the logical source, especially now that the internet has put a range of shopping possibilities at our fingertips.