Comparison shop for kitchen appliances on the Internet.
The Internet has substantially improved the ability of homeowners to comparison shop for kitchen appliances. Before the Internet, you began the process by making phone calls to local appliance stores and a few national retailers. Many stores would not give you a price over the phone, so the next step often involved driving from one store to another to get prices. You might discover after driving to a half-dozen stores that the first or second store had the best price. Now, you can quickly find the lowest price among dozens of retailers on the Internet.
Costco
Neither Walmart nor Target carries a full line of the three major kitchen appliances: stove, refrigerator and dishwasher. Costco, which prices aggressively, does not have an extensive selection, but it does have more than the other two stores. A black Whirlpool Super Capacity Dishwasher with six wash cycles, sells for $550. The same model in stainless steel sells for $100 more. You can order online.
Costco
800-774-2678
Costco.com/
Home Depot
Like Costco, Home Depot has both a website and a network of national retail stores. It carries an extensive selection of all kitchen appliances. You can buy some models of popular brands with very low prices only at Home Depot. You can order Consumer Reports' highest rated refrigerator, Maytag M1TXEMMWW, a 21 cubic foot top freezer model, from Home Depot's website for $699, which includes shipping.
Home Depot
800-466-3337
HomeDepot.com/
Lowe's
Lowe's, the other big home improvement chain, also sells products online. While both Home Depot and Lowe's offer huge selections of kitchen appliances, Lowe's tends to offer a slightly greater selection of high end products. Home Depot offers a very wide selection of lower priced models, and while both stores offer discount prices on virtually everything, product-for-product Lowe's prices often run a little higher.They sell a black 21 cubic foot GE top-freezer refrigerator for $799, with no charge for shipping. The same model with a stainless exterior sells for $200 more.
Lowe's
800-445-6937
lowes.com/
BizRate and PriceGrabber
Two large websites will do the comparison shopping for you. Neither BizRate nor PriceGrabber sells appliances. Instead they offer a wide selection of other sites that do, with each site's price for each item. Go to either website and search for a category, such as stoves, or for a specific item. A search on Bizrate for the Maytag M1TXEMMWW refrigerator brought up 9 sites, with prices from $699 to $736.88. The same search on PriceGrabber brought up three sites, with prices from $678.99 to $728. They also offered several similar, not identical products with higher price points.
BizRate
BizRate.com/
Price Grabber
PriceGrabber.com/
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