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Consumerism

Off the Cell Phone Diving Board!

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Welp, the time has finally come. I’ve resisted buying a cell phone as long as any human being could possibly resist. First, because in the early years the month-to-month cost was just out of the question. Then as I watched the fellow humans chattering their way up and down the malls and, in a yakfest-induced haze, stumbling in front of traffic and bicycles and crashing their cars and running down small children in pedestrian crossings, I thought none of that foolishness for moi! Also, truth to tell, I have a kind of moral aversion to going around attached to a tether.

I don’t WANT to be “connected,” damn it. I value my solitude and I especially value peace and quiet. Why would I want to be jangled at or vibrated at as I’m going about my daily errands? And everyplace and everytime else?

On the other hand…

On the other hand we have the superannuated Dog Chariot, that worthy wagon resting quietly in the garage. It has 112,000 miles on it (which reminds me: time for a service appointment), and it’s 12 years old, about 175 years in people years. Every time I get into that tank, whether it’s just to drive over to the Safeway or whether to make a serious junket to Scottsdale or to my friend’s house in Waddell, I wonder if the thing is going to get there and back without crapping out. In times of yore, it wouldn’t have mattered much: car craps out, you walk to the nearest gas station and call for help on a pay phone.

But today there are no pay phones. And people expect that everyone, no matter how poor, owns a cell. And so if they see an old lady standing by the side of the road, what are they gonna do? Nothing, of course. They’ll assume I’ve called someone and am waiting for them to show up.

So, just as a matter of safety, I think I’d better have a cell phone.

Fortunately, the little business earns enough to pay the freight…with pretax dollars. Accountant says the S-corporation can justify buying me a cell phone, it needing a phone number with which to communicate with its clientele. And also fortunately, prices have come down a little.

T-Mobile has prepaid plans that offer significantly more time and power than I need, and that do not lock you in to a contract you can’t escape. For $30, I can get 100 minutes of talk time, unlimited texting, and unlimited Web browsing. And no contract harassment.

A hundred minutes is an hour and forty minutes. I very much doubt if I spend almost two hours a month on the phone! And even if I did, it appears that some of these gadgets will plug in to your wireless service, and in that mode the thing isn’t using up your “minutes.”

You have to buy your phone when you use one of these prepaid plans. T-Mobile’s prices for these devices are exorbitant: $250 for an Android phone that you can get from Amazon for $189, with free shipping.

This thing, which appears to be a slightly outdated 4G gadget, is well reviewed by consumers. As for T-Mobile’s service, it is reviled slightly less than other communications carriers. No one seems to like any of them. Conveniently, this outfit seems to have a store on every corner, so if push comes to shove you can go in and speak to a human. Not that the humans can do much for you: when you do business with the company online, you’re treated as though you were doing business with an entirely different entity from the T-Mobile that appears in strip malls. However, I did learn that you don’t have to buy the phone from them to get it up and running on their network.

Decided to get a smartphone instead of the cheapest walk-around plain telephone I could get, because that seems to be the way to extract the most value from these plans. The $30 service allows one to connect with a smartphone, so it seems kind of ridiculous to pay for service and then not use it.

In that department, the Android seems to be the most sensible way to go. The iPhone is way too expensive, because to operate it you have to buy three different plans: a voice plan, a data plan, and a text messaging plan. With AT&T, for example, the data plan will cost you $15; the cheapest voice plan, $40; and the cheapest texting plan $5 a month for 200 messages sent or received. That’s a bare minimum of $60 a month, plus gouges for “taxes and fees,” plus gouges for exceeding the allowed number of phone calls and random incoming text messages over which you have no control.

Sixty bucks a month for a phone! That is outrageous. Even if I could afford it, which I most certainly cannot, I wouldn’t pay it. Thirty is also a shade on the high side, but it’s marginally affordable.

The low-rent plans advertised by AARP are universally reviled. I’ve developed a flinch reflex around those AARP “bargains,” after the Delta Dental fiasco. And, I might add, after learning that Safeco can provide more homeowner’s and auto coverage for significantly less than The Hartford does in its AARP plan. Check out some of the hilarious yowls of rage over Consumer Cellular, one of the plans advertised by AARP. At best, opinions are mixed. Cricket? Costs more than T-Mobile; enrages customers. Jitterbug? If these customers could award negative stars, they would.

T-Mobile doesn’t appear to be any better, especially of late, although it’s highly rated by PC magazine. A Consumer Reports survey found it was less hated than AT&T but less liked than Verizon or Sprint. Verizon has a prepaid plan, but it’s $50, more than I can afford. About $40 a month is the tops. Apparently there’s no limit on the amount of time you can talk, but why should I pay $120/year more for time I probably won’t use? You do get an alleged deal on a less expensive phone at Verizon, but according to CNET you can get that cheaper elsewhere, same as you can get the Samsung Exhibit II cheaper than T-Mobile’s price.

It appears to be a toss-up. A 2011 Consumer Reports round-up, available online only to those who are willing to pay to peek, suggested smaller carriers are preferable to the large networks and plugged Consumer Cellular along with TracFone, Straight Talk, T-Mobile, and Virgin Mobile.

TracFone has cheap monthly plans, but the company’s website is opaque. You can’t tell what you’re actually going to get for $10, $20, or $30 a month. For the $30 plan, you get 200 minutes over thirty days, but evidently there’s no web-surfing, no texting??? Impossible to tell.

Straight Talk has a $30 plan with 1,000 minutes, texting, picture messages, free 411 calls, all with no contract. You have to do business with Walmart to get it, unfortunately, but it looks like a better deal than T-Mobile.

For $30, Virgin Mobile gives you 1,500 minutes (take that, Straight Talk!). It also gives you 1,500 text messages, but only 30 megabytes of Web access. Interestingly, this outfit includes the extra dings and gouges billed as “taxes and fees” in the base fee, so presumably you don’t pay more than advertised. Here, too, for just $50 you can get a Samsung phone with an actual keyboard, helpful for texting. LOL! Click on the in-house reviews for the phones, and the same reviews come up for every phone! What d’you bet their customer service is comparable?

Do you have a prepaid, no-contract monthly cell phone plan? If so, which one do you  use and how do you like it?

Update: Here’s what came of this scheme, thanks to the generous advice of readers!

WTF Is in Your Food?

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Now, this is scary, but I dare you to listen to the whole freaking thing. No… Consumer alert: I’m afraid “scary” is an understatement. This report is stand-your-hair-on-end horrifying.

You need to hear this. Hold your nose to make your way past the nauseating part about how beef, pork, and chicken are fed and raised and (near the end) get an earful of Philpot’s thoughts on raising your own birds. It’s sorta heartening.

Think I just lost interest in eating Costco or grocery-store beef and lamb and chicken and pork and developed a profound interest in eating about a quarter as much meat but buying it at Whole Foods.

In the meantime, this line of thought brings me to something I’ve become quietly obsessive about. To wit:

Surely there’s a way caring people can work together to make life better in today’s dystopia, even if it’s only within their own small groups. For example: the chicken-raising project. Though everyone talks about it, La Bethulia is my one (count her, one) friend who has had the sheer chutzpah to actually DO it. Could we all learn from her and figure out how to keep a flock of chickens happy without having the carnivores that live with us eat the damn things? And with our collective knowledge and intelligence, could we figure out how to sell or donate extra eggs?

Good lord, folks… Do we ever need to resist Big (Business) Brother! If we worked together, could we find a cost-effective way to buy free-range beef, pork and lamb? Could we figure out a collaborative way to raise healthy chickens or ducks or goats or god knows what to our mutual benefit? Could we generate solar energy for a neighborhood and cut down on the coal-fired plants?

There has gotta be a way.

The Workman Waltz: Angie’s Dance

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So yesterday a guy who’s ecstatically recommended on Angie’s List came over to measure and give me an estimate on installing the three proposed sliding doors. And as experiences go, this one took the cake. It may be one of the most amazing episodes of the Workman Waltz to date. 😀

First off, he didn’t even want to be bothered with measuring…said he’d been in business long enough to know what the dimensions of sliding doors are. He just wanted to cut a deal.

When I insisted that he look at the door in the back bedroom because a previous owner built a wood frame around it, he was surprised to find it’s a different size from the other two doors (which themselves are not the same size, though at a glance they look like they are). He said it’s a nonstandard size. Then he opined that the original opening had been built for hinged French doors. Wrong on both counts: the original opening is the width and height it is because a happy handyman simply took out the window, cut the wall opening down to the floor, and framed the resulting opening to fit a standard small Home Depot sliding door.

Oozing into a chair at the dining-room table, he next tried to sell me a used door. His company just moved to new digs, and they removed doors they’d put into the place they were renting. So wouldn’t I like a FANTASTIC deal on a 13-year-old sliding door! No warranty of course.

Moving on, I asked what he does about lead abatement, something I learned about from the K&J Windows and Doors guy. As it develops, if a house was built before 1978, the federal government requires contractors who do any kind of renovation or replacement to test for lead paint and, if they find it, to jump through some nuisancey and expensive hoops. For example, K&J charges $100 for the lead test and $150 per window or door for the extra work that has to be done.

He now says he will not do an installation if there’s lead, because it’s too much hassle and the rule is too oppressive: the fine for getting it wrong is $37,500 and possible jail time. So, says he, the way to deal with this is I’ll give him a letter stating that I know the house has no lead in it. Then he’ll have his crew install the windows without screwing around with the lead abatement safety procedures.

“Well, I don’t know that,” I say. “The house hasn’t been tested.”

He says that doesn’t matter—just give him a letter warrantying that the house is free of lead and don’t worry about it.

In other words, instead of him paying $37,500 and going to jail, I can do it.

I say, according to the figures the EPA has published on the Internet, a house built in 1971 (the year mine was built) has a 24% chance of having lead paint.

He scoffs. “You can find anything on the Internet,” says he. That figure is wrong, he says: “I took the lead certification course, and I can tell you the chances of this house having lead paint are almost nil. Just give me the letter and we’ll install the windows.” I let this line of conversation drop, having found the figures from a chart published at the EPA’s website and recognizing a bald-faced lie when I hear it.

Now he demands to know how much others have bid. He emits an offer that underbids K&J, proposing not to install the Milgard or Simonton windows I’ve researched and specifically asked for but to substitute an off-brand. Then he says he’ll give me this SMOKIN’ deal only if I sign with him right that instant.

I say I have another contractor coming over to give me another bid, and I will decide which company to go with after I’ve gathered all the bids.

He now tries to high-pressure me, saying it’s pointless to get any other bids and that I’m being silly to ask for several estimates.

I say I’m not going to be pushed into signing a contract until I have all the bids I want.

He says unless I sign with him RIGHT THEN AND THERE, he won’t do business with me.

I say fine, good-bye.

He leaves, but drops his card on the table and tells me to call him if I change my mind.

Man! That was an experience.

The K&J guys are coming over this morning. So far, their bid, based on Freelite’s measurements, is a LOT less than Freelite’s. However, when I looked closely at their bid, I saw it did not itemize the 6.04% tax by each door, as Chip the Freelite owner had done in his bid. So I had to try to figure the tax on each piece, by way of deciding whether to buy all three or only two. But even with that added, they’re $1,461 less if I buy two narrow-rail doors and $1,835 if I buy three. That’s including K&J’s $150/window lead abatement charges, about which Chip said nothing. Yesterday I e-mailed Chip to ask if his bid includes the lead thing, but he hasn’t replied.

Calculating the tax is complex because it may apply to some things and not to others, and so I won’t know for sure what K&J’s bid will be until I’ve talked with an installer and asked him to provide the real, actual, final bottom line.

Freelight did nothing in the lead department when they installed the skylights and front windows several years ago, and I have yet to keel over dead. But that was before 2010, when this regulation went into force. So if there is lead in the house (which, this being Arizona, we can assume is the case), I was exposed to clouds of lead-laden dust. At the outset, the rule was supposed to allow a waiver for homes where no children and no pregnant women live; however, the EPA threw that proposal out before the law took effect.

If the required test reveals lead in the house, the hoops they have to jump through are quite dramatic. All the occupants have to leave the house and stay out until the job and the cleanup are done. They have to tape off your house with yellow hazard tape and put up those orange cones to keep people out. They have to seal off the work space by taping plastic all around each window, and the workmen have to wear protective gear (in 112-degree heat!). So as you can imagine, if there’s lead in the house, it’s unlikely the job is going to get done this summer.

Or at all…I’m inclined to skip the whole project, if that amount of hassle is entailed.

An option is to find out if there’s lead in the house and then just not do the work. However, it’s better not to know. If you do know, when you go to sell the house you’re required to disclose the presence of old lead paint, even though it represents exactly zero hazard if it’s been covered with latex paint and is not chipped or peeling.

Anyway, the crook described above has rave reviews at Angie’s List. He probably put people up to joining and entering cheery reports, no doubt by giving them even deeper discounts on the junk brands he’s peddling. I’m tempted to describe this story at Angie’s List, but if he gets nailed for violating the federal law, he’d probably hire Guido from Chicago to come do some serious damage to my house or me.

Image: Renoir, Bal à Bougival. Public domain.

Black Friday: Turn Off Your Phone at the Mall

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If you’re planning to dive into the Black Friday maelstrom, you might want to think about turning off your cell phone before you walk into the mall. That is, if you’re the type who passionately values your privacy.

In the latest encroachment by the quasi-government that is Corporate America, a couple of malls will experiment with tracking people’s movements as they wander from store to store by tracking radio emissions from their cell phones. This will be a lot subtler than some of the earlier strategies, which have even included hiring employees to stalk you through the mall. Forest City Commercial Management, which runs the malls in Southern California and in Virginia, claims this is not an invasion of your privacy because supposedly they can’t personally identify you without a court order.

Well. One man’s “not an invasion” is another man’s “get out of my face!” And as one reader pointed out, eventually computerized face recognition programs will make it easy enough to connect the image gathered as you enter the mall with the image you posted on Facebook. Nor is it impossible to imagine hackers breaking into the system and identifying users. If a hacker can do it, big business or government can hire the hacker to do it.

The only way to stop this intrusion is to turn off your cell phone before you enter the mall. Of course, that defeats the purpose of owning the cell phone, for which you pay a pretty penny: you wouldn’t have the thing if you didn’t want to be jangled up at every hour of the day and night, no matter where you happen to be or what you happen to be doing. But nevermind.

Hmm. Actually, this could be a good thing: wouldn’t it be nice to shop for a day without having to listen to people yapping on the phone?

While we’re in the silver lining department, this sort of news invariably makes me glad I can’t afford a cell phone and I can’t afford to shop in malls any more.

😀

Image: Appraiser, Escalator at Edmonton Mall. Public domain. Edmonton Mall is NOT one of the properties reported to track customers’ cell phones.

Life before Lemon Laws

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Sooo… After extracting some success from Adsense by lacing a post with a high-ranking keyword, I thought I’d try again, this time with the term “lemon law.” That, apparently, is hot just now.

As I was wondering how to decoct a few not-too-eyeglazing words on the subject, it occurred to me that I actually have a real lemon-law story, one that casts some light on why legislators came up with lemon rules in the first place.

Back in the Dark Ages, something over four decades ago, my then young husband and I were wedded by gaslight. We took up residence in an apartment that we furnished with the bribe my father gave the groom for eloping with me, thereby cutting short my mother’s grand plans for an elaborate wedding ceremony and reception. We each brought various items to the marriage, and one of them was a 1967 Ford Fairlane. It had been my parents’ graduation gift to me.

It was a very pretty car, with a custom two-tone paint job—a white top and turquoise body—and a swell tan fake leather interior. This being the first car I’d ever owned, and brand-new, I was very proud of it.

Well.

It was a good thing my husband found the apartment that he did: directly behind a Ford dealership. Why? Because this fine vehicle soon proved the old adage that FORD stands for “Fix or Repair Daily.”

That was almost literally true. The damn thing spent more time in Ford’s repair shop than it did in our carport. Fortunately, I could walk back and forth from our apartment to the dealership, because I made that trek about every second or third day for the year and a half we lived there.

Whatever could go wrong with that piece of junk did go wrong. I eventually came to suspect the mechanics were deliberately breaking things—jimmying parts so they would crap out within a day or so after I drove the car home from its latest repair. “Piece of junk” is far too kind a word to describe the clunk.

The car was only a year or so old—we were married in December 1967—but by the time we moved out of the apartment, the paint was chalking and wearing away. One day when I waxed it with a mild liquid polish, it actually rubbed the paint off down to the metal!

Once we no longer lived within walking distance of the auto lot, we traded the junk in on a cute little Toyota Corona, which ran and ran and ran. The Toyota never gave us a moment’s trouble; never needed any care beyond the routine maintenance. And that, my friend, is the specific reason I haven’t bought an American car in years. Even though we’re told Ford and Chevrolet have cleaned up their acts, I still don’t trust them, almost half a century later: that’s how badly we were burned by Ford’s unsafe-at-any-speed lemon.

There were no lemon laws in those days. If you got a piece of junk…well, you just had a piece of junk. The car manufacturer and its dealer had your money, and they were under no obligation to do anything to fix or replace the junk. It wasn’t until 1975 that the U.S. Congress enacted the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, whose purpose was to force auto manufacturers to abide by their warranties and to explain warranty terms in plain English.

Over time, states enacted their own lemon laws. These vary from state to state. The Wisconsin lemon law, for example, doesn’t cover mopeds, semitrailers, or trailers designed for use in combination with a truck or truck tractor, nor does it cover previously owned vehicles. The Michigan lemon law and the Colorado lemon law do not cover motor homes, although Colorado apparently does cover leased vehicles. But California’s lemon law covers new motor vehicles including such items as the chassis cab of a motor home, or a demonstrator, a dealer-owned vehicle, or other rolling stock sold with a warranty, including some vehicles bought primarily for business purposes.

Georgia’s lemon law, like most, excludes used cars. However, laws in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico and New York do provide statutory used-car warranties.

The Better Business Bureau has a page listing all the state lemon laws, with links to detailed summaries of each, plus a link that allows you to file a complaint with the BBB about your junker. Edmunds describes the recourse you have (in some states) if you buy a defective used car.

Wish we’d had a lemon law when we owned that shiny new Fairlane—I’m sure we could have collected.

Images:

1967 Ford Fairlane. Bill Wrigley. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.

Toyota Corona. Mytho88. GNU Free Documentation License.

Chase Bank Credit Card Frolic

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My little S-corporation has its own Chase Bank credit card, issued through the credit union. Well: make that “had.” Honestly, I don’t know why state agencies and credit unions do business with Chase: what a nuisance it is to deal with those huge, faceless banks. Chase has let my corporate credit card expire: no sign of a new card, no word from the bank…just notices from vendors who get paid by the card that they’re going to quit providing their various products and services because the card expires this month.

So yesterday I gathered all my psychological reserve of patience and plunged into Chase’s telephone punch-a-button maze. After a lengthy, aggravating wait spent listening to advertising pumped into my ear, a 20ish-sounding CSR got on the phone. Jumped through hoop after hoop after hoop with her, delivering every personal piece of identifying data the bank’s telephone script-writers could dream up, and then, just as I was opening my mouth to ask why they haven’t renewed the card, she says, “The information you’ve given doesn’t match the information we have.”

Oh shit. I forgot: When they ask “What is your date of birth,” they mean “What date was your company incorporated.”

So I say, “Hang on, I’ll have to get into my file and pull out the incorporation papers.”

“No,” says she, “Once I’ve entered your answers, I can’t enter any other answer.”

Say what?

You don’t get a second chance, if you’ve made a mistake in saying who and what you are. Just to get to the point where I would have the privilege of asking my question, now I have to waste another 15 minutes plodding through their FLICKING PUNCH-A-BUTTON MAZE AGAIN!

I just about went ballistic.

“All right, then,” said I. “Let’s just cancel the card.”

Of course, there was nothing she could do in that direction, either, because according to her records, the card was issued to a person who is two years old. And that, obviously, wasn’t me.

What excuse is there to treat customers like that?

So, I called the New York Times, which extracts its monthly subscription fee through that card, and switched them to American Express.

Then wrote to the customer disservice address on the Chase bill and told them to cancel the card (and yes, I do know that’s a hit on the corporation’s credit report, and I don’t care!!!!). Next, wrote a dear-sir-you-cur to the president of the credit union, enclosing the rant to Chase detailing what happened and suggesting the credit union might want to deal with some other rapacious organization:

Sam Wheeler
Chairman
Arizona State Credit Union
2355 W. Pinnacle Peak Rd.
Phoenix, AZ 85027

Dear Mr. Wheeler:

I’m canceling my corporate credit card, which is associated with my business account at the credit union, for the reasons described in the attached letter.

This is the second extremely annoying runaround I’ve had from Chase. Prior experience shows the customer service representatives and management at the credit union are helpless to intervene with Chase, so I have not bothered them this time.

You know, Mr. Wheeler, the reason I do business with a credit union is specifically so that I will not have to do business with despotic monoliths like Chase Bank.

I will find another credit-card vendor for The Copyeditor’s Desk. Since my credit is sterling, I expect no problem will arise. But I would suggest that the credit union has a problem: it’s called “Chase.” You might want to consider finding a better organization with which to ally the credit union, one that will not jack members around.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely, (etc.)

And finally, speaking of outfits that call its customers “members,” it was off to Costco, where I learned to my delight that even though I have the low-rent business membership, Costco will indeed issue a second American Express card to me, set up in the name of my business.

Even though, as Free Money Finance recently noted, Costco’s AMEX card is cutting its benefits, it still provides a substantial kickback on the kinds of purchases I usually make. Most of what I purchase on the S-corp’s card is office supplies, and what AMEX is cutting is the 3 percent kickback on restaurant meals. IMHO, a 1 percent difference on something I rarely buy is hardly worth canceling a card with a company that does provide pretty fair customer service.

Costco’s AMEX card kicks back 3 percent on gasoline, which, when combined with Costco’s low prices, is pretty respectable. The Costco near me consistently provides the lowest prices within reasonable driving distance, and AMEX is the only credit card their pumps will take. Although some cards will give you 5 percent back, they also are issued by despotic monoliths. I’d rather deal with just one monolith, thank you.

In the near future, I’ll be charging about $3,000 in computer equipment on this new American Express card. So, at 2 percent, that will generate a $60 rebate, right out of the hustings.

Chase owes The Copyeditor’s Desk a few pennies in customer reward kickbacks. Unlike AMEX, they don’t just send you a check.  You have to screw around and jump through hoops to get it. I’ve never bothered, since it’s loose change. No doubt I’ll never see that money. Such as it was.