Why Buy When You Can Test Drive?
Our family has a play console (A WiiSwitch now), as I have written about earlier). We don’t have many games for it. We haven’t 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. We have started to reserve them. We want to try them out. These games typically cost from $20 to $60 per game. I want to be very sure a game is “play worthy” before I purchase it. This ability to borrow games from the library is quite helpful to our family.
This can 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. However, we have purchased one game after a week trial. My son is still playing it, 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.
In Ottawa, it is not just Video Games. You can also try out 3-D printers and other cool tech things. Use your Library, and fight for it. It is a fantastic resource you won't realize is good, until it's gone!
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.