Black Friday Tips

I, myself, am not a huge ebay fan, but I know others who swear by it to get the biggest bargains there ever were. Well, ebay bargain hunters, your bargains may have just gotten better.

I recently came across a site called Auction Intelligence whose schtick is to find misspelled or mistyped listings--the theory being that very few bids will be placed on that item since the people using a normal search won't be necessarily landing on the same search results. There's a little mistrust on my part of a seller who can't spell...for some reason I suspect a bad speller might not get my item shipped to me in a timely manner, but the truth is I know A LOT of bad spellers who are more responsible than me. I mean, if the bad speller seller is misspelling like crazy and mentions that his uncle in Burkina Faso has esophageal cancer, you might want to exercise a little caution and pass that one up. Otherwise I like the idea.

And if you know you're going to be giving restaurant gift certificates, don't even think about purchasing them until you've checked Restaurant.com first. I don't understand how it's possible to buy a $10 gift certificate for $3 or a $25 gift certificate for $10, but I won't ask questions. Some of the restaurants in, say, Cincinnati or San Diego seem kind of random in there, but there are also a few gems (whose certificates sell out fast--I guess they're allotted a certain number per month). Best advice there is not to wait if you see a deal, even if you're getting it for yourself.

Now back to my Palm Springs getaway...