I’ve learnt a thing or two about economizing this last nine months as the economy has taken its sweet time deciding whether to get back into full swing after our election year.
But Safaricom delivered a heavy gratitude moment this week, after its customer care expunged a pile of charging SMS services from my account, and then called me back to the store, by phone, as I left the mall: to show me more ways still to cut my bill after examining my account.
The SMS services, it turns out, are a big place to slash when times are tight. Safaricom cancelled them in a moment, as can you, though the *100# menu, but some are hard to stave off. One news service, sending me anywhere from five to eleven texts a day, was charging Sh10 for each one.
Only as Safaricom took me through the bill did it strike me that the very same company sells its entire newspaper for Sh60. Yet I was paying often Sh100 a day for a few short snippets.
In fact, I loved that news service – it just wasn’t a Sh3,000-a-month product love! Others I didn’t even like, forever populating my inbox as some accumulated history of errors on pop-up menus. Off they all went. My abandonment didn’t pass without comeback. Over the following hours, my phone flew unprompted several times to an automatic re-sign up. Indeed, my attention needed to be at maximum to keep that SMS paying at bay.
Yet, all told, having got a handle on buying data bundles with my Bonga points (on *126#), and with my phone reprogrammed to never draw data from my general airtime again, that Safaricom visit saved me thousands of shillings a month. Nor is it the only swift way to clear out spending with barely a ripple to life as we know and love it.
Much has been said about the travails of our supermarkets, and it has been easy to see them getting emptier and the queues shorter (except for Carrefour, of course, with its own special line in long till queues).But less has been written about the recent rise of grocery wholesalers.
Be it Mahataji, in Kikuyu, Baba Dogo, Kawangware, or on Mombasa Road, Osman in Eastleigh, All Season, or Sanrose, our 2018 has seen the rise and rise of wholesale buying by consumers.
Some are now shopping as entire extended families to get that carton of toilet tissue, or soap, at a very big discount. More interesting still has been the rise on social media of postings searching out others from Westlands, or Athi River, or wherever, to join a WhatsApp group to run joint bulk shopping.
For sure, a wholesaler may not count as a high-style shopping experience, but when the tea bags get home and into the tea, they are still tea, and, again, not so much is lost for the big cash savings. My other big ‘spot’ has been the wonder of Facebook marketplaces – data privacy aside, there doesn’t seem to be a better way to buy or sell anything. In my own downsizing of recent months, I began as a newbie.
That Sh200 for a notice on the board at Sarit Centre – totally nothing.Then I tried the selling sites: OLX. Nothing. And ExPat Link. Sorry all, but this is a column about consumer rights and benefits, and no response is no response. Yet many of the Facebook marketplaces are literally huge and see sellers sometimes deluged by potential buyers.
They run on two business models, and I only used one. Some allow free consumer posts and make their money on ads with a huge traffic. Others charge the sellers.The ‘seller-pays-before-selling’ model didn’t grab me after my early efforts using other channels.
But the ones that rest on drawing sellers with free posts truly are an amazing service. Of course, tighter financial times aren’t a joyride. But it shocks me now how much money I was wasting, and how many unused and even cluttering goods I was living around. Sometimes, those tougher times force us to focus on what really matters: and jettison the rest. And the result can be better.
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Note: The results are not exact but very close to the actual.
