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Idle essays

Do We Have More Expenses Than Our Parents Did?

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At Surviving and Thriving,  a reader named Grace posted an interesting comment on Donna Freedman’s latest gracefully written post about generosity and about keeping perspective on one’s own problems.

Perspective is such an important thing, and one that we so often lose in the face of our personal woes. While I am quick to whine about my financial state, I do try to keep in mind that my parents reared their children, bought a home and had a satisfying retirement on far less than I make. Naturally, they didn’t have my expenses, but truth to tell, I shouldn’t have my expenses!

Our parents brought up their families, paid for a home, and had an adequate retirement despite never earning much…. They didn’t have our expenses, but…maybe we indulge ourselves. Oh, God. I can’t resist:

Really? Is that so?

My parents rented all the time that my father was working — partly because we lived overseas for ten years, and partly because my father felt mortgage interest was the biggest rip-off known to humankind. When my father retired, he bought a house in Sun City with cash.

The house my parents retired to would sell for about $71,000 today. In 2004, it sold for $110,000, considerably less than Zillow thinks it was worth at the height of the bubble, in 2005.

My parents bought that house in 1962. Let’s go with the $71,000 figure as the value of the house, although, relatively speaking, it may have been somewhat higher when the place was brand-new. In 1962 dollars, that price would be $9,235.  In 1960, the average price of a Sun City house was about $10,550 — and my parents’ house was one of the smaller models.

I think my father earned about $8,000 to $10,000 a year as a Merchant Marine deck officer with a license to sail any tonnage on any ocean. That translates to about $61,500 to $76,880 in 2013 dollars. And it’s probably low: today a tanker captain with an unlimited license earns between $120,000 and $200,000. However, toward the end of his career my father sailed, by choice, as first mate, because the job didn’t entail 24–7 responsibility for the ship’s operation and safety.  So, the lower figures are probably accurate. My mother occasionally took office jobs, but she wasn’t paid much — in today’s dollars, probably no more than about 18 grand. By the time my father retired, purchased a new car, and put me through college, he had about $130,000 left in savings; that would come to about $999,400 in today’s dollars.

If that estimate is anywhere near accurate, he was doing a great deal better than his daughter is doing.

Is it true that they didn’t have our expenses?

Well, my father paid for my tuition, room, and board at the University of Arizona. He gave me $1,000 a year to cover all my bills for the nine-month academic period. That’s the equivalent, in 2013 bucks, of $7,868. I paid the tuition and dorm bills, budgeted $10 a week for all my meals, clothing, laundry, and other incidental expenses, and, at the end of spring semester, came out about even. Today, if you lived on campus, it would cost you about $24,744 to attend the UofA.

So: check! There’s an expense he didn’t have.

The four-door Ford Galaxie he bought cost $2,500: about $19,980 in today’s dollars. Not much difference there: that’s what I have budgeted for the purchase of my next vehicle.

In 1962, the cost of gasoline was about 25 to 30 cents a gallon: $1.92 to $2.31 in 2013 dollars: about 2/3 of what we pay today, adjusted for inflation. Some savings there, but not as much as one might have expected.

A Porterhouse steak cost $1.19 a pound; hamburger was 45 cents a pound; butter, 67 cents a pound; baby food, 25 cents for three jars; carrots, 9 cents a bunch; asparagus, 19 cents a pound; potatoes, 39 cents for 10 pounds; corn, 5 cents an ear; onions,  29 cents for 2 pounds;  oranges, 89 cents for two dozen; bananas, 10 cents a pound; bacon, 79 cents a pound; Crest toothpaste, 50 cents a tube; Tide laundry soap, 59 cents.

How much would that market basket cost us today, if we paid the same amount in inflation-adjusted dollars?

• Porterhouse steak: $9.15 a pound (= $1.19 expressed in 2013 dollars) (Safeway has Porterhouse for $5.99 a pound just now)
• hamburger: $3.46 a pound (Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates average price of $3.055/pound for 100% ground beef in 2013)
• butter:  $5.15 a pound (BLS estimates $3.37/pound in 2012)
• baby food: $1.92 for three jars (at Walmart, 98 cents for two; that’s $1.47 for three)
• carrots: 69 cents a bunch (BLS estimate: 55 cents a pound, which would probably be about $1.10 a bunch)
• asparagus: $1.46 a pound (on sale at Safeway in 2011 for $1.28 a pound)
• potatoes: $3 for 10 pounds (in 2011, the federal government estimated you’d pay about $6.50)
• corn: 38 cents an ear (in 2012, $1 for 6 ears at Safeway; 17 cents an ear)
• onions: $2.23 for two pounds — about $1.12 a pound (last week I bought onions at Safeway for 88 cents a pound)
• oranges: $6.84 for two dozen (today’s price: 88 cents a pound; for 24 that would probably be about $10.55)
• bananas: 77 cents a pound (55 cents a pound, Safeway)
• bacon: $6.07 a pound (BLS estimate, 2013: $5.23 a pound)
• Crest toothpaste: $3.84 per tube ($3.67 at Kroger; $1.67 with a coupon)
• Tide laundry soap: $4.54, unknown quantity (2013 price: Costco, $17.49 for 170 ounces, high efficiency)

Let’s compare. In the comparison, though, let’s drop the laundry detergent, since we don’t know how much that inflation-adjusted $4.54 bought and since the new HE version would wash many more loads than 1962’s Tide would.

What would they have paid, in the same dollars we use, for their products, and what are we actually paying for those products today:

1962 vs 2013 prices

I swear: I’m not making this up!

If you express the amounts they paid in 2013 dollars and then compare what you and I would pay for the same products today, the total is…just about the same!

So no. Their day-to-day expenses were not a lot less than ours.

What about utilities?

Well, the average residential cost of electricity in 1965 was 2 cents per kilowatt-hour; adjusted for inflation, that figure would come to 15 cents per kilowatt-hour. In 2010, the average cost for residential users was 11.53 cents per kilowatt-hour. No bargain for our parents there.

Most homes had no air-conditioning, although we did have swamp coolers and window air-conditioners, which, like heating systems, were inefficient and expensive to run. And of course no one had ever heard of a DSL connection.

Average cost for cable TV: about $50 a month; in 1962 dollars, this would have been $6.50. But it’s moot: there was no cable TV in 1962 — television viewing was free. There was less advertising, too, we might add.

After much Google and Yahoo searching, I haven’t found a reliable figure for the base monthly cost of a residential land line in the 1960s. Today’s basic cost for cell phone service of $30 to $50 compares favorably with the  $45 landline cost claimed by Wiki Answers (there were no cell phones, of course), except…$45 would equate to $331 today, plus you had to pay extra for toll calls. Highly unlikely. If memory serves, I think the base residential cost was $8 or $10 a month, but any call to another area code, including one just a few miles away, would result in a long-distance charge, which could be pretty expensive. When we lived in San Francisco, my mother had to pay long-distance charges to call her grandmother in Berkeley, a 20-minute drive across the Bay Bridge. Assuming you rarely made toll calls, though, a $10 bill of 1962 would be $76.88 today — about what I pay Cox for a DSL connection and a landline.

If we moderns dispense with the land line, we can get cell service for a much more modest rate. We’ll have to pay for the phone itself — but that’s a one-time hit. And besides…the “phone” is not really a phone: it’s a tiny computer connected to the airwaves.

In 1968, a 23-inch color console TV cost $349; a quick conversion indicates this was the equivalent of $2,328. A 60-inch high-definition flat-screen color TV will set you back only 980 of today’s dollars at Costco. And you won’t have to deal with the recurring visits by the repairman that we enjoyed during the 60s.

The average salary from which our parents paid costs that were the same as or higher than the prices we’re paying today was $4,659 in 1965 — $31,082 in today’s dollars — and most households had only one salary: the man’s. Today’s intact families usually have two earners. In 2012 the average starting salary for new college grads (those who could get jobs…) was $44,259. For all earners, the average salary in 2011 was $42,980. But bear in mind: in many households today, two adults are working. In 2012, the average U.S. household income was $63,091 — twice what a typical married couple in my father’s generation could expect.

Think of that. They were paying the same or higher costs — sometimes much higher — for the same products and services we buy. But in many cases those products and services, such as automobiles that were unsafe at any speed and clunky hard-wired phones with extra fees for long distance and TV sets prone to snow, static, and spinning images, were decidedly inferior to ours. Overall the cost of living was not a heckuva lot less, when the monetary units consumers paid with are inflation-adjusted.

• Did our parents make far less than we do? Yep. In general.

• Did they have fewer expenses than we do? Not exactly.

• Should we have our expenses? Well, sure we should. Most of them buy the same services and products our parents had, only better in quality and lower in real cost. The only indulgence I can see in the expenses shown above is cable television — and many American TV fans have canceled that in favor of cheaper, less wasteful entertainment such as Netflix.

Maybe there’s a reason we live in bigger houses than our parents did, collect electronic gadgetry that would have been science fiction to them, and park two or three cars in the garage: we can afford them.


 

You Get What You Pay For

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Have you seen Mrs. Accountability’s latest post, the one contemplating the glories (or not) of Fiverr? It’s pretty interesting.

She’d mentioned that site over the phone a while back, shortly after the episode with the friend of the “who needs enemies” variety. So naturally, I shot right over there to see what it’s about.

What you find when you arrive at Fiverr is a list of offers of services and small products for five bucks a pop. Some of these (like graphic design) actually could command a decent rate, and some (like images a computer program can toss off in 10 seconds) ought not to. Based in Israel, Fiverr is an international enterprise, and presumably many of its vendors are living in countries where $5 will buy a week’s worth of food.

A similar program (presumably owned by the same outfit, given the identical site design) is called “Twenty Fiverr”; people who think they’re worth more offer the same kind of services and products for twenty-five bucks instead of five. Here’s a guy, for example, who promises to provide seven “quality” articles in less than 24 hours, using a program that generates pap-filled, verbose, redundancy-laced, and vacuous squibs, and he’ll do it for a bargain $25.

I have a lot of beefs with this model.

First, as a self-employed skilled worker who has nothing to sell but skill, experience, and time, I highly resent being undercut by people who are willing to work, it seems, for little more than an ego trip. This is something that for years has kept rates down for writers and for graphic artists, especially those who do business within the publishing industry. Publishers know that some people who can construct a basic article will do it for less than minimum wage — some will do it for nothing — just for the joy of seeing their names in print. The result usually has to be completely rewritten, but that’s what the assistant or associate editor is for. At both of the magazines where I worked full-time, a large part of my job entailed sitting down at a computer and, starting at Word 1, rewriting articles by freelance “writers” from beginning to end.

Many magazines have two or three contract pay scales. Unemployed or moonlighting journalists who actually do know how to research and construct a competent article are paid a living wage. Everyone else gets crumbs. Some publishers simply will not pay a living wage to anyone, because they know plenty of amateurs will do the job (or something like the job) for next to nothing.

It’s the intellectual equivalent of off-shoring. In the case of Fiverr and Twenty Fiverr, it probably is literal off-shoring, too. As an individual buyer of services and products, my sense is that those of us who resent corporate off-shoring of American jobs have no business doing the same to American contract workers. Buy American. And pay something more than slave wages, if you expect to see your country’s standard of living remain above the Third World level.

When one person does a job, even a poor job, for less than fair pay, that person drives down pay for five, ten, or twenty other people for whom work is a living, not a hobby. In my book, that’s wrong.

Second, you really do get what you pay for.

Let’s take a look at the “high quality” article that squib-generator built, using a set of key words relating to weight loss. Here’s its  lead:

Weight loss is a confusing topic. There are so many different people and articles telling you so many different things, it can be quite difficult to wrap your head around them all. This article will aim to lay down the essential and necessary basics of weight loss in hopes to clear the fog that surround it.

Does that make you want to keep reading, as a lead should? It makes me want to run away…but let’s stand our ground and take a hard look at the thing.

“Weight  loss is a confusing topic.” No, it’s not. Weight loss is a process, not a topic. In any event, as statements go this one adds nothing. Right off, we know we’re dealing with a writer who is either a moron or an amateur. Or, in this case, a machine. Even machines can beat around the bush.

“So many different people…so many different things.” Nice use of redundancy to pad space! Is it likely that a person would say “many identical people telling you many identical things”? If the inserting opposite term creates an absurdity, then the adjective in question — “different,” in this instance — is probably  redundant. Here, it is redundant to the power of two.

“Difficult to wrap your head around them…” I should say so, unless your head is made of Silly Putty.  Our electronic author first coins a cliché and then turns it into a grotesque image. Note that it injects another cliché (“to clear the fog”) in the following sentence.

Cliché is the least of the next sentence’s offenses, though. First, instead of telling us anything significant or intriguing, the electronic author vows to try to give us a few fundamental pointers on the mind-numbing topic of weight loss, with no promise — only “hopes” — that whatever follows will enlighten us. This kind of pap a lead does not make. Then it ends with a faulty idiom (“in hopes to clear”: a native speaker would write “in hopes of clearing”) and a grammatical error (“the fog that surround”: subject-verb agreement).

Come to think of it, the entire article is replete with grammatical, punctuation, logical, and idiomatic errors:

• “Easier” used as an adverb (Electro-author meant “more easily”).
• “Change subtle habits that will increase the amount of walking one has to do”: if the habits increase the amount of walking you do, why would you want to change them? Possibly Electro-author meant “develop” or “build”?
• No comma after “but” used as an introductory word (some people think it’s bad form to use a conjunction to begin a sentence, but that rule doesn’t apply much in journalistic writing).
• Lettuce that’s “more green”…heeeee!

Writing style is, to put it kindly, nonexistent:

• Neither the second nor the third section shows any sign of paragraph transition.
• Verb mood jumps from declarative to imperative in paragraph 5, for no discernible reason.
• Complex ideas are touched upon and sometimes given a cursory example, then dropped with no clue to how the advice might be interpreted or used.
• The final paragraph regurgitates the first one, adding nothing except another hilariously grotesque image: “too many hands in the soup.” Careful not to choke on those knucklebones!

At Twenty Fiverr you get seven such “quality” articles for $25…not a bad price, to make yourself look like a moron to whomever reads one of the things.

My momma always used to say that you get what you pay for. But it wasn’t until I moved into the first house I bought by my little self, as a single woman, that I truly came to appreciate that old saw.

The house had washer and dryer connections, and it must be said that one of the chores I hated most in life was schlepping my laundry to a coin-op laundromat. First order of business was to install a new washer and dryer.

Being the naturally submissive type, though, and hooked up with a very dominant gentleman, I allowed myself to be persuaded to buy a low-end Monkey Ward washer and dryer. The two machines looked good at the outset: extra large, nothing fancy but evidently serviceable.

The dryer lasted about a year. Soon as it went off warranty, it crapped right out. Annoyed (and by then wise to the fact that boyfriend was pushing me into doing things I knew better than to do), I had to go buy a new one at Sears.

The second model was far from top of the line — it was a mid-range Kenmore, well liked by Consumer Reports. Twenty years later, it’s still out there in the garage running well. From the day I tossed the first load of wet laundry into it, the thing worked better than the Monkey Ward cheapo ever did, and it still works.

By purchasing a piece of junk first, I caused myself to pay significantly more than it would have cost to have just ponied up a reasonable price for a reasonably good product in the first place!

If I’d replaced the junk with another cut-rate product, I’d probably be on my fifth or sixth dryer by now, to the tune of four or five times what a single decent appliance cost.

The personal finance message? Bully for you if you can get a generous  mark-down on a good product that started out at a fair price. The blade cuts two ways: paying a lot more doesn’t always buy a lot better quality. Paying a fair price — not the lowest though not necessarily the highest, either — is likely to get you services that do the job well and products that work and hold up over time.

 

 

Gearing Up for a New Semester

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The magazine-writing course is now mounted in Canvas and ready to go live. All that remains is to figure out a couple of minor details and then, two weeks or so from now, click “Publish.”

And it only took a couple of evenings in front of the television to get it done!

I’ve pretty much got that online course down to a science, so that it requires only a bit of tweaking to update it each semester. Links die; new sites come to one’s attention; the occasional new pedagogical scheme crosses one’s mind. It helps a  lot, though, that the course is only eight weeks long. From the student’s point of view, it’s probably pretty intense, especially during the first two or three weeks when they need to come up to speed. But from my point of view, it’s sooo much easier to mount than an online course, and so much less work and hassle than a full 16-week course.

What a relief it is not to be teaching classroom sections! I don’t think even I realized how exhausted I was by the end of last year.

Yesterday I spent some time putting the finishing touches on a client’s manuscript and was shocked at the number of typos and misspellings that had slipped past me. Among the things that hadn’t gotten done: Because Word sees almost all pharmaceutical brand names and generic drug names as incorrect, one’s eye goes blind to all the little red squiggles under every other scientific term. Long ago, I should have checked

every.

single.

drug.

name (patented or generic)!

at its manufacturer’s website.

Our heroic author had misspelled two drug names, and I, assuming after all the guy’s a doctor and he must be right, had missed those errors. Also missed a couple of mundane typos of the sort that escape the bleary eye. So tired was I that I was making stupid assumptions and neglecting to do tasks that ordinarily would be routine.

Of course I picked up that nasty cold just before Christmas, hours after the last day of class, and then was pounced by the Index from Hell. No doubt it was sent to Hell in the first place by my overall zombification; a job that should have taken a week morphed into a three-week marathon.

I’m not missing the teaching income (yet): The Copyeditor’s Desk doubled its revenue goal in January and has done OK so far this month. But that’s not going to last, unless serendipity strikes again…we’re almost out of work and nothing new is in sight. I may be forced to get off my duff and hustle up some jobs.

But in the meantime, not working is some kinda heaven!

Having to schlep to a college campus and cope with roomsful of restless, ill-educated, ill-mannered post-adolescents was blighting my life. In the absence of having to devote some part of every day to tasks I don’t much care for, my life has completely changed. Even though this damn back thing makes everything hurt from the waist down, I feel wonderful!

P1010966Literally. Every day is downright blissful. Rain or shine, it’s a beautiful day. (Well. The frost we might have done without…) It’s so heavenly to accompany the Queen of the Universe to the park, loaf around watching tiny people play on the kiddie gym and moms push babes around in strollers and carriages, soak up the sun, and just do…nothing.

And it’s so wonderful to have my house be picked up and clean, without my having to find a full day in which to work myself sick to make that happen. I hate living in a pigpen! But that was what my house was, when I was too busy and too tired to take care of it.

Then there’s the magnificent meal in the middle of the day, complete with rather more wine than prescribed. Today: grilled steak, avocado and butter lettuce salad, grilled yellow summer squash swimming in home-made cherry tomato sauce, strawberries with Greek-style yogurt and crunchy sugar, Castle Rock cheap but highly acceptable pinot noir. Coffee.

And an amazing new phenomenon: sleeping seven hours a night, come Hell, high water, or Saturday Night Live. Yes. True that. The four-hour nighttime naps have gone away. When I go to bed, I sleep seven hours, not the four hours on average (range: two to five hours) to which I had become accustomed. Fall into the sack at 9:00 p.m.: wake up at  4:00 a.m. Go to bed at midnight: wake up at 7:00 a.m. Imagine that!

Life is, for a change, worth living.

What is this? The middle of February? It actually has taken all this time — two and a half  months — to unwind enough and rest enough even to become aware of the bliss the new state of affairs brings.

Bumhood.

Some years ago (quite a few, come to think of it), an ambitious young fellow got hired as an associate by the prestigious law firm in which my then-husband was a partner. He accomplished this coup largely on the strength of an original scheme he’d come up with as a student: he spent a summer living on the streets with the homeless, and then he wrote a paper about the experience, which he’d managed to get published.

He once remarked that the single fact that struck him most was the overall happiness of the people he’d met. Even though many, he allowed, were mentally ill, by and large they were surprisingly content and not at all grieved by their chronic state of unemployment. They were reasonably well fed and had adapted to life in a cardboard box; by and large they felt they had few serious problems to deal with and were satisfied with their existence.

He came to mind the other day as The Queen and I were wandering around the park. She wears out pretty fast if I make her hike along briskly (after all, one of my steps equals about ten of hers), but allowed to stroll at her own mostly leisurely pace (except when cats and small children heave into sight), she would probably go a long, long way. Forever, maybe. It  occurred to me that if I chose, this dog and I could spend the whole day just roaming around. If I could get her on the bus or the train (and I could, by claiming she’s a “service animal” — one lady brings her poodle to church in that guise), we could explore the entire city on foot. If we so chose.

When my ex- and I lived in the Encanto district (a richly yuppified central-city lawyers’ and doctors’ ghetto), several homeless shelters and halfway houses resided nearby. These outfits would take in people about 5 or 6 p.m., feed them, bed them down, and then eject them by 8 in the morning. They had no place to go. And so what they would do is walk, ride the buses, or sit in the city library all day long. One old gal used to walk around the city all the time. No matter where you went south of Indian School, sooner or later you’d see her marching along the streets. And there was a guy who’d make it up to Glendale, walking, walking, walking.

Cassie and I have our own flophouse. We could see the city, for the price of a pair of shoes and a senior citizen’s bus pass.

Bumhood is good. I like it.

When Someone You Know Is a Crook

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Money Beagle has a great post on how one goes about making bail, a reflection occasioned by the discovery that a former friend was accused of embezzling $400,000. It’s really a shocker when someone you thought you knew well turns out to be crooked as the proverbial hound’s hind leg.

First time it happened to me was when an ex-flame of mine was arrested somewhere east of Yuma, ferrying the largest haul of cocaine that had ever been nabbed in Arizona.

Heh. He always aimed high. This was the guy who soured me on Republican party politics. If you think “dirty tricks” were dreamed up by Richard Nixon’s boys, think again. 😉

Never occurred to me, though, that his career ambitions extended beyond sabotaging the presidential campaigns and hustling call girls for visiting big-wigs.

Krantcents, commenting on Beagle’s post, reflects on his experience teaching at the Leavenworth army prison and remarks, “The main difference between a criminal and me is I realize I would be caught the very first time where they think they will never be caught….”

Maybe that’s the fundamental difference between the law-abiding type and the crook. I was always too scared of getting caught to cheat, lie, and steal.

So namby-pamby was I, it wasn’t until I hit middle age that I noticed how much stuff some people get away with. The reason some people think they’ll never get caught is that it’s objectively true that they very well won’t ever get caught. The first time I realized a married couple of my acquaintance was committing what appeared to be insurance fraud — again and again! — I was flabbergasted. The worst that happened (other than the disintegration of their life, more a function of their personalities than their larceny) was that their insurer eventually refused to cover their home or car.

After that I began to notice what people around me were pulling off: outrageous mortgages that of course they couldn’t pay; selling bloated mortgages to people who obviously couldn’t afford them; “buying” a dressy outfit, wearing it to a party, and then returning it with a claim that it didn’t fit right; drinking and driving; buying and selling weed and ’shrooms; shoplifting from clothing and grocery stores with impunity; gaming the FMLA law; collecting from insurance companies for nonexistent neck injuries after minor fender-benders; declaring bankruptcy and then heading off to California for an upscale vacation; embezzling from a law firm and leaving the partners holding the bag; and on and on and on.

It’s no wonder college-age students think they can lie and cheat their way to honors-level grades, given the role models they see. They seem to expect to get away with it.

And probably, most of the time, they do.

Would you like a set of Noritake? Or a place setting of Lenox? At a discount!

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By way of clearing out some space here at the Funny Farm, I’ve decided to sell some fine China that my then-young self and my then-young husband purchased in late ’60s or early ’70s.

The most interesting of the two items on offer is an 8-place-setting set of Noritake in the “Trudy” pattern. Apparently Trudy is no longer made, so you have to go to places like Replacements, Ltd. to get it — or find it serendipitously in an estate sale. Here’s what it looks like:

noritake_Trudy

That’s the cup and saucer, and below is the plate:

noritake_trudy_dinner_plate

This is stamped on the back of each  piece:

P1020052

Proof positive:

Noritake — yes
Trudy — yes

They’re quietly elegant China. Tiring of the heavy, casual-looking stoneware that was the rage when I was married, I bought this set because I wanted something a little more formal for entertaining, part of the job description for a corporate wife. I found them at Goldwater’s, probably in the early or mid-1970s. Was very proud of them until it dawned on me that hand-washing dishes for eight people was not my cup of tea. It’s been lightly used, and as far as I know (I haven’t unpacked the entire box yet), it has no chips or dings. I think some of the plates may have a little wear of the platinum ring around the outside.

Then we have one place setting of this:

lenox_china_solitaire

I have one, count it (1),  full place setting of Lenox in the Solitaire pattern: plate, salad dish, bread & butter dish, cup, saucer. It’s in perfect condition, having never been used.

When I was a young bride about to marry a corporate lawyer on his way to partner at one of the most prestigious law firms in the Southwest, I did what all the other young brides did and signed up for the registry at every department store in town. For our China, we chose this Lenox Solitaire, which to this day I think is just gorgeous.

Lenox still makes this pattern. Today it’s selling for much less, relative to what Americans earn, than it did back in 1967, when I entered the blessed state of matrimony. The firm bought us a full set of the silverware we craved. But only one person gave us a place setting of this stuff. There was no way my husband and I could afford to buy any more of it — and he made very good money. The company was acquired in 1983; I have no idea whether they made changes in their production or quality control, but one reviewer at Amazon observes that pieces she purchased within the past couple of years don’t compare with Lenox from the 1960s.

Apparently not all the newer products carry the Lenox stamp on the back, which you can see on mine:

P1020056

I’m going to sell both sets — the eight place settings of Noritake and the single five-piece place setting of Lenox, either through a consignment shop here in Phoenix or through e-Bay. However, first I’d like to ask Funny about Money’s readers if anyone would like to purchase one or both directly from me.

The Noritake has been offered at Replacements, Ltd. for $630 for 45 pieces (eight place settings, of course, will give you 40 pieces); Classic Replacements has had it for $60 for five pieces but evidently has no Noritake in stock; and on e-Bay it has been sold for $55 a place setting (that would come to $440 for the complete set). I’d be willing to sell the Noritake set to a reader for $400, plus shipping.

The Lenox is $90 per place setting at Bed Bath & Beyond, and I spotted it at Amazon for the same price. Replacements, Ltd., is selling it for $70 a place setting. I think $65 plus shipping would be a fair price.

If you would like to purchase one or both of these, please let me know. You can reach me at funnyaboutmoney {at} gmail {dot} com.

Less I$ More

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Not in the good frugal minimalist way. At Cox, it develops, “less is more” means “less for more.”

After endless calls from “Rachel of Card Services” (who actually is a recorded message used by several offshore phone solicitation scammers) and more recently from creeps who know my age and try to scare me into buying various redundant and useless “security” services and devices, I decided to quit resisting and shell out an extra $10 a month for Caller ID.

So this seems to be working. It’s kinda cool. The phones flash up the caller’s phone number, and for unknown reasons one of the extensions tries to enunciate, in Electronic English, the caller’s name, usually coming up with something  unintelligible. Entertaining. And on the first couple of days it derailed several incoming scams. Nice!

Then a couple of people said they’d tried to call but the voicemail wasn’t picking up.

I figured they probably dialed the wrong number.

Yesterday I’m on the phone with a client. She’s calling from a cell phone with kind of a weak connection, so I figure the periodic BLEEEET in my ear is from some sort of interference.

Conversation ends. Check the e-mail. Message the first:

“I tried to call but your voicemail isn’t answering…”

Check machinery. Yes, it is answering.

Hmmmm….. BLEEEET…no busy signal…no voicemail…uhmmm… Duh!

So I kill another 10 minutes or so trying to get through to a live person at Cox. I figure the guy I talked to a few days ago added Call Waiting in addition to the Caller ID…must’ve figured he could do me out of another few bucks by tacking on an extra “convenience.”

Dunno about you, but I really dislike Call Waiting.

It’s rude.

• In the first place, I don’t want to be badgered by someone trying, unknowingly, to butt in to a conversation I’m having.

• In the second place, it’s incredibly offensive when someone says “Oh, there’s another call! I’m putting you on hold so I can answer that.” Implication: you aren’t important enough for me to give you my full attention. Or, other possible implication: I think I, wonderful little me, I am sooo important I must be at the beck and call of all my operatives, underlings, and superiors. Either one: offensive.

• And in the third place, it’s just plain bad manners to push the person you’re conversing with out of the way so you can let someone else horn in. If, after all, the late-comer’s call is important, she or he will call back.

Rude. Rude, rude, rude.

Finally a human picks up the line. She confirms that yes, the guy I spoke with did give me a package bundling Caller ID and Call Waiting together.

I say I don’t want Call Waiting.

She says she can arrange that, but it’ll cost more.

“What?”

“To get Call Waiting alone will cost $1.20 extra. Plus tax.”

For godsake.

Well, I figure it’s worth $1.20 — $14.40 a year (plus tax!) — to eliminate yet another of the myriad nuisances of life in the 21st century.

But boy, does it piss me off. Why should consumers have to pay more to NOT get something they don’t want?

Then she remarks that the total bill for the Internet and the land line will come to just under $100 a month.

Really? Seriously? A hundred bucks a month for about $30 worth of flicking services????

Started to look around for other high-speed providers. Looks like there are quite a few, and some, including Verizon (roundly hated, I know…but are any telecommunications providers not reviled?), offer the same things I’m getting for less.

So I guess tomorrow when I feel more like hassling with these people, I’ll start calling around to see if I can get a better deal.

Like I have nothing else to do with my time. 🙄