Thread: Kmart, dontcha love the broken bargins?

Im sure youve all seen it its the forlorn cage with the dented damaged and soiled stuff on it... The stuff that no one loves and take back demanding a new one or a refund in an effort to make back their money on stock it winds up here and sold at rediculous prices (but almost never below item cost)

Today we had to go out and get a new bung for alex's new second hand water bed that had been sold to us at a garage sale because it had a leak no-one could find (the bung no less) at the princely sum of $20 so on our meanderings we just happend to troll on past said cage of unloved stuff...

Those of you who know me know the rest of this story already and might as well skip ahead to the how much money i saved for about 20 minutes worth of my time while watching DR who.

so anyway I cant resist something that I can salvage a bit off of, repair or just pull apart just to work out how it ticks. The usual kind of conversation that takes place when me and SWMBO go near it goes kinda like this.

could you fix this?
whatcha looking at?
its a remote control car.
whats the sticker say?
wont run(or something else but this is one of the many we had today)
hows it look?
its in the box.
got all its bits?
looks like it even comes with batteries
whats its original price and whats the markdown?
X/Y.
yeah grab it if the budget has room.

so after 3 of those conversations today we wound up with

1x remote control car original price $40 and we got it for $15
1x6 set of those solar lights that plug into a common solar panel in a fake rock so you can put the lights somewhere in the shade if needed $50 odd and we got it for about $20
and one of those multi combo jumpstart/light/aircompressor things. originally I dont know what it cost but it was marked down 3 times and the last one was from $60 to $45 at least one of the previous looked like it was triple figures


The remote control car wouldnt run, turned out that it did run you just had to put the switch in the off position as some nut had installed it backwards (or soldered it up wrong)

the solar lights were easy I took the plastic shipping tag out of the batteries but that died fairly quickly and running my battery toaster on them showed one of 3 being dead.

and the jump pack apperntly would not take a charge and the compressor wouldnt run, quick in shop testing showed a dim light on the incandesnt, the test button showed a red light on the led and the fluros sort of flicked the inverter made a super annoying whine and then the lights came on. That was easy when I took it apart the board connector from the charging jack to the charging regulator had fallen off so I plugged it back in and its good as gold..

on the way out I grabbed a catalog and although it didnt show exactly the items I grabbed based off of the cheapest price for the closest item I could find today we saved $120 for the cost of 20 minutes of tinkering time and 3 AA rechargable batteries.

now the jump pack I can understand but doesnt anyone do the fiddle with switches and check the batteries/read the instructions thing before they take stuff back? and which nongie allowed the solar lights thing back in, did they even check it? My first clue that not enough people care was that the little tag that said "remove before first use" was still sticking out of the battery case.

Originally Posted by x-box

You obviously know this, but "when all else fails, read the instructions" .
Scary how few people do that - so well done on your "bargains"

I would take it back if I had to read this gobble dee gook.