Shopping the North Carolina Furniture Outlets How to Save 50-80% on Your Next Furniture Purchase

Chapter 1 How to Get the Most Out of North Carolina's Furniture Stores, Whether You Travel to North Carolina or Not OVERVIEW We've all lived our lives with furniture all around us. But until you have the North Carolina furniture experience, you're like an Elvis Presley fan who has never seen Graceland, or a baseball aficionado who has never been to a big-league game. Once you shop for furniture in North Carolina, you'll never look at furniture the same way again. North Carolina is the furniture capital of the world. Planning is the key to getting the most out of North Carolina's furniture stores. Don't think of a trip to North Carolina as an end in itself. Think of it as the culmination of weeks, months, or even years of planning. As in all areas of life, it helps to do your homework. The goal of this section is to prepare you for the furniture-shopping experience of a lifetime. This begins with an overview of the benefits of shopping for furniture in the furniture capital of the world, including real-world examples of people who bought and saved. It continues by letting you know what to expect when you deal with the North Carolina furniture business: the different types of stores, how best to navigate them, how and when to negotiate, and how your purchase will actually proceed from ordering and deposit to shipping and receipt. Perhaps most important, this section is full of insider advice-based on interviews with the experts-on how to arm yourself for the most effective possible furniture shopping expedition: making floor plans, taking measurements and photographs, reading magazines, and shopping around locally to get ideas and inspiration. Throughout this section and throughout this book you'll find tips and strategies from veteran furniture salespeople, store owners, manufacturers, and experts, all with the goal of making you a better-educated consumer. And, of course, this section will lay out all the practical details: how best to get to North Carolina, the best times of year to go (and the critical times not to go), the situations in which you can make purchases by phone, and the essential information about airports, sales taxes, emergency services, weather, and more. HOW MUCH WILL I SAVE? There's no set formula for determining how much you'll save in North Carolina, but no matter what, you'll save a lot relative to the total amount of your purchase. Still, it's probably not worth traveling all the way to North Carolina just to buy a chair-unless it's a very expensive chair indeed. To determine whether a furniture-shopping expedition to North Carolina is worth your while, you need only do a little arithmetic: First decide how much you plan to spend on furniture. Then assume you'll save from 40 percent (if you have very specific decor requirements and will be custom-ordering merchandise in your choice of color and style) to 70 percent and more (at the outlets and clearance centers, where you buy furniture directly off the showroom floor in whatever shape it's in). Then compute the cost of your trip (transportation, accommodations, meals, and incidentals) and subtract. It readily becomes apparent that you don't have to buy a whole lot of furniture to pay for a trip to North Carolina. And since North Carolina is one of the most beautiful states in the nation, offering everything from picturesque mountains to the world's best whole-hog barbecue, think of a North Car-olina furniture shopping expedition as not only an all-expenses-paid shopping trip but also a free vacation. A simple rule of thumb: If you plan to furnish a whole room-or your whole house-you're the ideal candidate for a North Carolina furniture shopping vacation. If you're only buying one piece of furniture, it's usually not worth the trip, unless you're buying a very expensive piece of rare furniture or you're going to visit some of the many sights the region has to offer anyway: thShapiro, Ellen R. is the author of 'Shopping the North Carolina Furniture Outlets How to Save 50-80% on Your Next Furniture Purchase', published 2003 under ISBN 9781400046478 and ISBN 1400046475.