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Out, About, and the Frugality of DIY

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Only noon, and this has already been a busy day.

After returning from an early breakfast out with some dear friends, I took it into my hot little head to wash the car, before it actually does get really hot outside. Parked the annoying little tank in the shade, penned up the dogs, and dragged the hose out to the driveway.

Night before last, I’d vacuumed the dog hair out of the driver’s-side carpeting. Cassie and Ruby’s hair forms a film over the tile floors. Even when the floor looks clean, in fact a skiff of dog hair coats it. The loose hairs stick to the bottom of my shoes and shake off onto the car’s fake carpeting every time I get into the vehicle. The stuff is kind of brushy in texture: it grabs every hair and clings tight to it.

You can’t just brush it out. You have to vacuum it, and an ordinary household vac doesn’t work much better than a cleaning brush or a dog-hair removing gadget. You have to wrestle it out with a shop vac. And I can assure you: that is a job.

Also the day before yesterday, I’d gone down to the Target at Bum Central…, uhm, Christown Spectral Spectrum Mall after filling up with gas at the Costco in the same garden shopping center. Target: because I’d learned that lidded plastic kitchen trash bins of the sort I intend to use in the plan to repel garbage-scavenging identity thieves are now so out of style that supermarkets no longer carry them. Costco no longer carries them. And…yeah, Target had one…they wanted 60 bucks for it!!!!

Give. Me. A. Proverbial. BREAK!

Do I really have to order this thing from Amazon? Seriously???

I decide to travel abroad: it occurs to me that The Container Store at Town & Country Mall would be likely to have one of these antiquated designs. They have everything else, after all. And so, it was off to traipse across the city in search of an ordinary plastic trash basket, that rarest of all commodities.

On the way I passed a Bed Bath & Beyond and thought they surely would have the things, probably cheaper. But parking in that mall’s lot is a freaking nightmare, especially around the lunch hour — which, by then, it was. So proceeded on a quarter-mile to the Container Store.

Good thing: Lookit this!!! Twenty-five bucks at BB&B for a fine red trash can, a piddling 7 gallons. And no lid!

A regular 15- or 20-gallon plastic trash can — also without a lid, the sort of thing you used to see around an office: not available at BB&B unless you also buy a slide-under-the-counter apparatus, to the tune of  $32 to $68:
They’re kidding, right?

At The Container Store, I found lidded trash cans for around $13, which was inflation-adjusted OK. I guess. They only had one model, cheesily designed. Prices for most ranged from $35 to upwards of $200.

W.
T.
F.
?????

So I got the cheapest lidded thing I could find. It will do the job, but for how long?… Not very, I expect.

What the hell is going on in this country that you can’t even buy an ordinary kitchen waste basket!???

Meanwhile, the car really needed to be washed. Normally I’d park it outside in a rainstorm, let the shower wash it, then pull it back into the garage and dry it off. But we haven’t had a decent rain in many, many months. The car was filthy and the windshield so dirty I couldn’t get it clean enough to see through, even with squirt window cleaner.

There’s a car wash across the street from Town & Country, one of the few remaining car washes that do a halfway decent job. So decided to cruise through there, rather than having to (ugh!) actually work to do the long-overdo job myself.

Not so much.

The car wash is mobbed, as usual, because it’s the only actual full-service operation for miles around. But on approach, I find they’ve revamped their entry lanes, adding a lane labeled “Express Wash.” This takes you straight into the car wash, without making you stop at gas pumps, where they hope to sell you not only gas but windshield repair and tire polish and any number of other fine emoluments. There’s no one in it, so naturally I dart in.

Then I realize there’s a reason no one is in this entry lane: it’s for people who have bought a “membership”!

Heh. Evidently there’s not much demand for car wash memberships. 😀

Luckily. With no one behind me, I back out. And see that all the other lanes are jam-packed. And wonder…why am I doing this? My hose works, no? Do I not have a whole bottle of automotive window wash stuff? Do I not have a sprayer? Do I not have a giant stack of microfiber rags?

So wove around the dozens of waiting patrons and headed on my merry way.

That saved about $15, approximately the cost of the prized plastic waste bin.

Washing the car is really very easy. And it provides some nice exercise. By the time I got home from this a.m.’s crack-of-dawn breakfast, it was still fairly cool outside, and the yellow oleander was casting a large patch of shade across the driveway. I’ve found that those 3-M sponge blocks made for cleaning your walls work handsomely to rub off smashed bugs and road tar — and they do not seem to damage the finish. Soaking a clean microfiber rag with windshield wiper fluid (it comes in 1.5-gallon bottles) and wiping down the windows with that works much better to clean the windows than Windex and paper towels.

Whilst thrashing the bush in search of a waste basket, I happened into a Costco (which would be why I happen to know Costco doesn’t carry them). IMPULSE BUY: grab one of their wonderful roasted chickens for lunch (and future meals).

Ahem.

Make that “formerly wonderful.”

Stash everything away and sit down to what I think will be a great meal of roast chicken, fried potatoes, and salady stuff.

Not so much…

The chicken was SO OVERSALTED it would make your mouth pucker up!

Yech!

Of course, Costco’s chicken has always been salty. It is, after all, a processed food — it comes from the slaughterhouse injected with brine and then has various “flavorings” (mostly salt) added. But it was never intolerable before. This one was, in a word, inedible.

So I peeled all the rest of the meat off the carcass — meat I’d planned to use for at least two or three more meals — bagged it up to use for future dog food, and put the bones in the freezer for a future pot of chicken broth. Which I won’t have to salt…

Is it too salty to give to the dogs? No doubt. However, I’d also bought a giant slab of pork tenderloin there. This morning I cooked up a quarter of it, which I’ll grind up in the food processor with the chicken. and of course, the dogs’ meat is mixed with veggies and oatmeal or rice. “Diluting” it in that way, I hope, will make it more or less edible for canids. Just remember to put out extra water…

So that’s the last time I’ll buy roasted chicken at Costco. Too bad.

Wash your own car. Roast your own chicken. Get better service. Save a lotta money.

Amazon vs Costco: The Impulse Buy Olympics

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So here’s a question for you: which retailer represents True Impulse Buy Hell — Amazon or Costco?

One could argue that Costco has to be the winner, because it’s impossible to get out of there without making at least one unplanned purchase, usually of something you don’t need. Costco, beloved Costco: it’s like a Medieval bazaar. No matter where you look — left, right, down, up, in front of you, behind you, above you, below you, in someone else’s shopping cart — there’s some amazing new product to covet.

However, I would reply that Amazon has a single characteristic that allows it to beat out Costco in the Impulse Buy Sweepstakes: you don’t have to go there to instantaneously diddle away cash. Although Costco does offer online shopping and delivery, generally to shop there, you make a drive, get out of your car, hike across a parking lot, and walk around in the place. You have a shopping list (if you possess any sense at all…), and that at least gives you a shot at restraining your impulses.

Consider Amazon:

Here you are sitting around the manse, and an idle thought enters your sweaty little brain:

I haven’t seen [__fill in the blank__]  for quite some time. Gee, I’d like to have a [__fill in the blank__]. Do they even still make [__fill in the blank__]?

Thus:

• I haven’t seen Windsong cologne for quite some time. Gee, I’d like to have some Windsong again. Do they even still make Windsong?
• I haven’t seen the original Swiffer dust mop kits for quite some time. Gee, I’d like to have another one of those. Do they even still make those things?
• I haven’t seen real nail buffers with real chamois cloth for quite some time. Gee, I’d like to have another real nail buffer. Do they even still make those things?

Now, you know and I know that neither of us needs any of those things. Indeed, if you apply a squirt of Windsong behind your ears, you will smell just like your grandmother. Not that it’s a bad thing…just sayin’.

Out of curiosity, though, you cruise over to Amazon, just to see if any of these fine items is still produced somewhere, by someone. And yea verily!

Who’d’ve thunk it?

Naturally, you would never want to miss your chance to purchase this fine item. Who knows? This could be the last time you’ll ever have such a superb opportunity! Click once, click twice…and it’s winging its way toward your front door!

Canceling the order after you come to your senses is not like simply rolling your cart around the store and placing the useless junk back on the shelf. Canceling an online order requires a hoop-jump. Even if it’s not a very difficult hoop-jump, it still may be aversive enough to make you think…oh WTF. It doesn’t cost that much.

This has happened here at the Funny Farm, of late.

My beloved Le Creuset teakettle quit whistling. Because of my ingrained tendency to carelessness, I must have a whistling kettle, lest I burn the house down. Tolerating no delay (the insurance company that covers the house would be proud of me!), I instantly hopped online and ordered up a new, radically expensive teakettle. Forthwith, Amazon kicked into gear.

Well.

Within a day, my beloved Le Creuset changed its mind and decided to start whistling again. What choked it, I do not know. But I do love my little green teakettle and have no great desire to replace it. But, speaking of hassle factor: do I want to return the cute new blue Le Creuset? Hmmm…

  • This entails figuring out how…
  • It may entail a trip to the FedEx office…
  • At the minimum, it will require rewrapping and repackaging the thing…
  • The present kettle is at least 10 or 12 years old (more like 14, if memory serves), and so the minute I ship this new one off, Beloved Green is going to croak over once and for all.

See what I mean? If it had been Costco, the next time I happened to visit a Costco store, any Costco store, I would take the redundant pot back and hand it over the counter, no questions asked. But given the hassle factor of returning an online purchase, I decided to put it in a cupboard to break out whenever the present teakettle dies. Or give it to my son for Christmas… 😉

 

Mall as Gym?

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So we just knew there has to be something worthwhile remaining amongst America’s dying suburban malls.

And no doubt of it, most of them are dying. Not too long ago, I commented on Scottsdale Fashion Square, Arizona’s answer to Rodeo Drive. That entrancing venue along with an open-air shopping center are about the only retail malls in the Phoenix area that can be said to thrive.

Friend of mine and I made a grand tour of Scottsdale Fashion Square a few months ago and found the commerce pretty lively. The rich, after all, are always with us. And when there’s only one Prada store in the whole state, well…

So yesterday SDXB, who appears to be dying of boredom out in lovely Sun City, announced that he wished to schlep to Scottsdale and spend some time hanging out in that august realm.

We arrived shortly after 10 a.m. and were greeted by — wouldn’t you know? — a friendly concierge, who apologized for all the construction. The place was pretty much torn apart, though the stores were trying to do do business around the chaos. Probably because of said chaos, the place wasn’t as crowded as it had been, but new and even more ridiculously upscale stores had been moved in.

We spent about 5 hours trotting around. Then we went to a couple of freestanding stores in central Phoenix, which required us to not walk but RUN across two  major thoroughfares, twice. By the time we headed home, we had gotten our exercise, free, thanks to a three-story shopping mall and a spread out sprawl of storesl

And therein lies a strange tale:

We observed that all the Majorly Fancy-Pants Retailers — Armani, Bulgari, Kate Spade, Jimmy Choo and a slew of others — are clustered together on the west end of the mall. The middle-brow stores that you’d expect to see in an ordinary shopping mall anchored by a department store or two are banished to the east end of the mall, down by the entrance to the movie theater and the greasy-smelling food court.

Hm. Interesting strategy. In effect, they end up with two malls: Rodeo Drive on the Desert and yet another plain-vanilla shopping ghetto for boring chain stores full of Chinese products: J. Jill, Ann Taylor, Express, and on and mind-numbing on.

Remains to be seen how that will work out. Personally, my guess is that most of the custom will go to the elegant stores, and the Chinese-junk stores will languish. Why even bother to go out to buy that junk, when you can order it on line? But why not go out and buy from a Brighton or a Cartier when you are Mrs. Gotrocks, you can afford it, and you have nothing else to do? And no, you’d never be caught dead in a dowdy piece of J. Jill fatlady junk designed to fall apart in six months?

How d’you think this will go, dear readers?

The Internet Is a Many-Splendored Thing…

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How do I love the Internet? Let me count the ways…

Continuing to ruminate on the bed-purchasing project and reflecting on how meh one feels about the ugly pieces of furniture available at Ikea, I chanced to wonder what Pier 1 has. And Cost Plus. And…and…and…  Yeah.

Hence, a Google search in the wild.

Yes. Pier 1 does sell platform bed frames, but apparently not in twin size. BUT, saith Google, maybe you oughta take a look at this-yere Home Depot page.

“Home-freaking-Depot? You must be kidding, Mr. Page.”

“I kid you knot,” replied the virtual CEO.

And lo! Lookee here!

JUST the ticket! I was going to paint the cheap-looking Ikea number black, to match the black wicker Pier 1 rocking chair residing in the proposed “guest bedroom”/office with the ultimate recliner. And this one has no hideous DIY-looking headboard thing attached to it.

Then, darned if it doesn’t get BETTER. Lookit this:

Dang! Isn’t that moderne! More to the point, it is tall enough that you could push a (dog hair-breathing) vacuum cleaner or a swiffer mop under it with no problem. And…hang onto your hat…the price is $70.40!!!!!

They’ll ship it for “free” (meaning, of course, that it cost HD $71 less whatever they estimate to be a typical delivery cost less the wished-for profit). The wooden one runs twice that: $143.

This would solve the problem.

The assembled height of each of these clunky gems is about a foot — 11 inches for the wooden number. Unless you bought a real mattress with box springs, the resulting bed would be so low that hauling an aged, aching human frame off it would be painful. But for the price, you could afford to buy a traditional innerspring mattress with a box spring, which would make it tall enough to get up with relatively little discomfort.

Wonders never cease, eh?

What Price a Decent Night’s Sleep?

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Apparently the demand for a decent night’s sleep is SO high that mattress- and bed-makers feel comfortable charging all the market will bear, and then some.

Flare-up of the old familiar back pain caused me to think that I should carry my computer to a bed or sofa to work. But the living-room sofa isn’t really very comfortable for reclining, and there IS a limit to how much I want those dogs loafing on my bed. For quite some time, I’ve been thinking that I’d like to put a twin bed in the spare room, so as to be able to claim (after a fashion) that I have a guest bedroom. And also so as to have a bedstead that’s light enough for me to slide a couple bricks under the legs at the headboard (or whatever), in case the GERD-like thing resurfaces.

So today while I was at the better Costco in Paradise Valley, I checked out the price for a twin bed.

HOLY mackerel! $350 for the mattress alone! If you wanted a real mattress (as opposed to a sponge-rubber simulacrum), the mattress and box springs would set you back $700 to $1,000.  Then you have to buy the cheesy metal frame thing to set it on.

Moving on.

That Costco is next door to a Penney‘s. Not my favorite place to shop, but…really? Five hundred to upwards of $2,000. What do they think the damn things are made of? Tried one of the cheaper foam numbers: ugh! Like sitting down on a kitchen sponge.

Once I got home, I checked online at Ikea and at Tuft & Needle.

Ikea has both foam and innerspring mattresses. In the past, I’ve tested the foam mattress, and it’s comfortable enough (I guess)…though I suspect it could be pretty hot and sticky on a summer night when you can’t afford to cool the house much below about 82 degrees. Foam: $89 to about $400; latex (whatever is the difference?): $1,000. Innerspring: $130 to $800. They don’t seem to carry a box spring — but the truth is, that’s not needed.

Tuft & Needle, of course, carries only its specialty, a roll-it-up foam number. The twin version is $325. Of course, the concept of “box spring” does not exist in the T&N universe.

Whichever you chose, you’d want to get SOME sort of bedstead, whether it was just a metal frame or something that looks like furniture. Tuft and Needle makes one, but not in the twin size.

Ikea has a variety, the best of which appears to be the “Tarva”: made of unfinished wood, very simple and plain…perfect for the proposed “guest” bed and substitute office desk. In fact, since I’d be doing a lot of CE Desk work reclining on this thing, by way of minimizing the back pain, it occurred to me that I might even get away with making the business buy it. Sale price(s): $79 and $109. Darned if I can tell what the difference is.

The wood is ugly and Ikea suggests you stain or at least wax it for durability’s sake. Right.

I have no idea what the quality of an Ikea mattress is. T&N gets good reviews, probably engineered by its marketing department, but whatEVER. Probably the path of least resistance would be to order both the mattress and the slab to put it on from Ikea. And Ikea will deliver, for a $60 ding. Since it costs about $8 to drive to the far East Valley in a vehicle that doesn’t have room to carry a mattress(!), where the Ikea store resides, it probably would make sense to simply order the pieces online and have them delivered.

That’s assuming this is something you won’t be sleeping on every night…

Arise, Costco Customers of the World!

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Welp, we apparently can’t do much about the mess in Washington. But… we can make an impression on even the most mega of megastores. To wit: if enough customers complain, eventually management will get the message. Like, say, the management of Costco.

This will require a LOT of people to complain about an issue, and to do so regularly and vociferously.

What is the issue? Consumer-proof packaging. We Costco customers, as a group, need to complain long and loud about the layers and layers of landfill-jamming plastic and the hard plastic-and-cardboard clamshells that cannot be opened without a stick of dynamite. Not only is this stuff a nuisance, it’s a vast menace to the environment. None of this armor, with the possible exception of the sheets of advertising cardboard (which are permeated with toxic inks) is biodegradable. A million years hence, archeologists from the next species to inherit the earth will find geologic layers of this crap buried in the earth, in exactly the form in which we deposited it. And most of it is utterly unnecessary.

If Amazon can make its vendors present their products in packaging that the buyer can get into easily, Costco surely can do the same. There’s just no excuse for a person to have to use a wrench and an Exacto Knife to get into a stupid package. And today…jeez.

Yesterday I bought a pair of bottles of Costco hand lotion, the kind that comes in a bottle with a pump top. Tried to open the pump top on the first one, after having wrestled with the obnoxious environmentally nasty plastic shrink wrap that holds the two bottles together. No luck. When you try to unscrew it the way other such tops work, it does nothing but spin the entire inside assembly. The pump will not come open to work. Got a wrench to hold the inside assembly steady whilst trying to manipulate the handle. No luck.

Why? Really, what IS their excuse for selling products that are unusable because their packaging can’t be opened? Now I have to drag this stuff back to Costco, and I guess I’ll have to order something from Amazon or traipse to Walmart to find a replacement. Like I HAVE NOTHING ELSE TO DO WITH MY TIME!

Costco has no chat line, nor is it possible to find an email address. They force you to call one of a myriad 800 numbers to try to get through to a human: a vast time waster that will send you climbing around a phone tree like the monkey they apparently think you are. One customer remarked this morning that reaching them by phone entails a 47-minute wait!

However…you can reach them at their Facebook page. Here, they try to discourage people from commenting — especially from posting complaints. So what you do is scroll down past the “status” line where they invite you to post a comment (but then will not accept it) to one of Costco’s advertising/customer rah-rah posts.

Every time you have to do battle with their consumer-proof packaging, go to their Facebook page and post a complaint!

If you go there right this minute, BTW (9 a.m. Thursday, December 7 — ah! the Day of Infamy!), you will find customers posting that the Costco website — the one where you order things online — has been compromised. Says one correspondent:

I think your website might be compromised. I was going to order something today, and someone else’s credit card info, name, shipping address and membership number popped up. I can’t email you with a screenshot of Neil Gallagher’s info and your FB won’t let me share it with you. I can’t even post it directly on your page, so I hope you see it here. If you do have a membership with Neil who lives in Lovelock, NV and has a member number ending in 517, you might need to check to see if your website has been hacked.

Several other Costco members posted the same. Just a few minutes ago Costco disabled access to its customer sign-in. So: if you’ve ever ordered anything from Costco online, keep an eye on your credit card statements…now and evermore.

Postscript: A Costco clerk figured out, with some difficulty, how to get the darned lotion pump gadgets open and managed to get BOTH of them working. Twasn’t easy, but she did it.