Ready for a major appliance? Save up to 50 percent on a new appliance with a scratch and dent store.
As part of our frugal lifestyle, I do a lot of stockpiling and freezer cooking, so a stand alone freezer became a real need for us. I love being able to buy large bags of chicken or vegetables on sale (March is Frozen Food Month), and take advantage of buy one get one free turkeys. Tripling my recipes and freezing the extras saves on both money and time. Having a well-stocked freezer also means that we are less tempted to eat out.
Of course, we didn’t want to spend too much money on a freezer, after all. The whole point of having the freezer was to save money on meals. The cost of running the freezer could be justified, as could the freezer itself, as long as we were very frugal about our purchase.
So when it came time to pick out a freezer, we decided to forget about the regular appliance and department stores and seek out a scratch and dent store.
Scratch and dent stores specialize in selling large appliances that may have a bit of cosmetic damage. This damage usually happens when the appliances are being moved from one place to another, such as from the factory to the warehouse, or from the warehouse to the store.
The outside of a range, for example, may have a scratch in the surface of the paint, or a refrigerator may have a dent in its side where someone, who wasn’t paying attention, banged it into a wall. These scratches and dents are often repaired by the store, so they look less noticeable, but they are still there.
Otherwise, the appliances are in perfect working order and come complete with all of the warranties and service contracts they would have if they were sold in pristine condition.
Since our freezer was going to spend its life in our basement, we didn’t really care if it had a scratch or two on it. Each little scratch was worth at least several months of food, is the way I looked at it. And most of the freezer we saw had scratches in the back or bottom corner of the appliance, making them pretty much unnoticeable anyway.
To find our scratch and dent store, we simply asked around. You can also do an internet search, look in the phone book or ask at Sears, which often has their own scratch and dent store.
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