Oprah, We Miss You!

Ever since Oprah retired from daytime television, my afternoon TV selections have been up for grabs. Then, to add insult to injury, they moved Dr. Phil, my only connection to sanity, to a new and different time slot. Suddenly, Anderson has a show and he goes from a respected news commentator to a rag seller trashing the city's back alleys. Katie Couric has a show now, but it's only geared to the female audience. What's a guy to do? Work?

One day while surfing the stations that I have, I settled on Anderson for a few minutes and some woman came on and told of an App that she felt was rather revolutionary. It's called SHOP SAVVY. Here's what it does. You download it to your smart phone and when you use it, it's shocking. I figured I'd try it. It's free, so after searching the web and coming up empty, I decided to try the App Store on my iPhone. It popped up immediately and after a few personal questions, I was ready to download it. It took about 45 seconds and it was ready to use.

Proving that I was now an active member of the 21st century, I was fearless! It offered a window and I was to hold it up to a bar code of any item I wanted to know about. It offers the price the item is asking and then it offers you options of where this item can be purchased for less in your immediate area. Wow! I tried a book that I had bought at Costco for $5.69, a Patricia Cornwell novel entitled Red Mist. It had it's bar code still intact. I held the phone up to it using the camera lens to view the bar code and within seconds it beeped and told me I could have bought this book at Barns and Nobles for $2.35 new and $1.19 used. It also listed a few other places that the book was available, for less than I paid Costco I might add. Now the purpose of this is not to save $4 on a book, although that doesn't hurt, but think about the big ticket items. I bought a 42" Vizio TV one day at Walmart for $450 plus tax. I thought that was pretty cheap and it was. A few days later I spoke with my friend Barry and he offered to me that he just bought the same TV at Costco for $500. That's 50 bucks saved. That was just luck on my part. Now with Shop Savvy, I may not need luck. 

*Martha Jane, you should jump all over this!

PS. The book was a big disappointment.