The Library and Video Games?
Why Buy When You Can Test Drive?
Our family has a play console (A Wii as I have written about earlier), but we don’t have many games for it and we haven’t really thought about buying too many games, however, the Ottawa Public Library came into play again for us. I noticed that they loan video games for a week for free for the Wii, so we have started to reserve these games for us to try out. Given these games typically cost from $20 all the way up to $60 per game, I’d want to be very sure a game is “play worthy” before I purchased it, so this ability to borrow games from the library is quite useful to our family.
The fact that this can all be done from home is also very convenient, and it being free is that much better for me. If we don’t enjoy the game, we simply return it and think no more about it, but we have purchased one game after a week trial, which is still being played by my son, so I view this experiment in Consumer Frugality as a success for that reason.
I have heard folks use this same technique when it comes to buying cars, they will rent a car that they are interested in trying out for a vacation (say a week) to figure out whether they like the car or not, so it effectively becomes a week long test drive, which is a good idea as well.
Not too many other things you can try this with other than books and CD’s from the library, but I could be wrong, any other things you can give test drives with? I suppose some software, but they usually have very tricky buy strategies or worse you get a castrated version of the software to try out (which is not really a test drive).
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July 27th, 2009 at 7:32 AM
Hi,
Good suggestion. I often do the same by renting the game from the video store (Rogers, Blockbuster, whatever) as the selection is usually a lit more up to date than our local library.