Buying Crayons for Juan Or at the Pelikan Warehouse Sale

Last Saturday (28th March 2009), Mommy went to the Pelikan Warehouse Sale (27th -29th March) to see what good deal stationery items Mommy can get for Juan Or. This Pelikan office is located at Jalan Puchong and is next to one DHL building. Mommy reached there at 10am and customers were allowed to park in their office's parking lots (no fuss from the guards also - Pelikan's Open Day sort of!). Crowd-wise? Not too bad, i.e., quite a lot of people but not too many, probably because it was still early.

In the sale area (which only occupies a large room), there were basically 3 sections: office stationery (pens, glue sticks, highlighters, marker pens, correction liquids, etc.), toner of various laser printers (mostly HP and Lexmark printers), and children stationery (colour pencils, oil pastel crayons, watercolour paints, PLAKA). The moment you enter the sale area, a Pelikan personnel will provide you a box for you to carry things.

However, Mommy was not too happy with Pelikan's payment system. Customers were required to go to the office stationery section's counter to sort out office-stationery-only purchases for the Pelikan personnel to issue an invoice. Then, if the customer also wants to purchase children stationery, then the customer has to make another queue at the children stationery section's counter for the Pelikan personnel to issue another invoice! After that only the customer can go to another payment counter to pay for the goods. Why can't Pelikan make everyone's life easier by merely letting customer grab whatever he/she wants and then just go to one counter only to get the invoice issued and then go to the payment counter? Or better still, upon issuing the invoice, the customer immediately pays for the goods there and then. That will save a lot of trouble and queues! Because of this troublesome system, Mommy decided not to buy the glue sticks (which was sold for RM1 each at the office stationery section). Instead, Mommy just settle for buying children stationery. Here are Mommy's yield:

(Pelikan's oil pastel crayons, 36 jumbo sticks, sold for RM7 each, which is cheap!)

(Pelikan's oil pastel crayons, 24 sticks, sold at 2 boxes for RM5, which is a very, very good buy!)

(Pelikan's colour pencils, 36 colour pencils, sold at RM10 per box, which is only considerably cheap. It comes with a free sharpener.)

All in all, Mommy spent RM29 for all the items above. Upon Mommy's inspection of the Pelikan products purchased, Mommy concluded that these colour pencils and oil pastel crayons are made in Germany! Unlike Staedtler's Luna Classic colour pencils (24 colour pencils) which are manufactured in Malaysia and sold in Tesco for RM21.90 (but Mommy bought it before at RM14.90 in a past promotion). So far Mommy has only gone to Tesco to survey the original price of the above items, but found that Tesco does not carry the Pelikan brand of colour pencils and oil pestel crayons. Also, the Pelikan's stocks in this sale are still new and the packagings are still in good condition.

Other things that Mommy saw in the sale (not a complete list, though): laser printer toner (RM99) which doesn't carry the Konica Minolta brand is the printer that Mommy has, gel pen (RM1), 12 short colour pencils (RM5 for 2 boxes).

Yes! Mommy knows that Mommy is buying children stationery way too ahead in time for Juan Or. And Juan Or can't even hold a pencil properly yet! Yes, blame it on Mommy's anxiety to buy things for Juan Or. Mommy views things too far ahead already! Here's what Mommy has prepared for Juan Or many, many months before this blog came into existence:

[Staedtler's Luna Classic colour pencils of 24 pieces bought for RM14.90 in Tesco; Staedtler's Noris Club of 24 colour pencils bought for RM7.49 (comes with free 4 writing pencils, a sharpener, an eraser and a ruler, all Staedtler brand) from The Store; Justice League 24 colour pencils for RM6.50 (comes free with Justice League 12 colour pencils, an eraser, a mechanical pencil and leads) bought from The Store; and Dexter's Laboratory pencil bags which Mommy got free from Dutch Lady's redemption. Pencils, ball-point pens (which Mommy got from attending various scientific seminars) , an eraser and ruler are already in the pencil bag.]

(Colouring books and activity books of Mickey Mouse and Friends, Winnie the Pooh and Sesame Street characters. You can download these colouring pages from the sidebar links of this blog.)