Coffee heat rising

Shopping

What Price a Decent Night’s Sleep?

by

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!

by

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.

Ironing weirdness, Costco, and $$$$

by

Good grief…i think i just saved myself a nice little wad of cash by NOT (i hope) buying a new iron. Maybe.

So last night I’m pressing the Costco Blue Jeans Collection when I notice this faint, tingly bzzzzzzt sensation as my fingers rub lightly against the inside of the iron’s handle.

Hmmm…WTF is that? Feels like ’lectricity…

Dork around a bit, test this, test that, thinking it’s gotta be my imagination.

No. Apparently not. Unplug the iron: no bzzzzt sensation.

So I figure the beloved Shark iron, which I’ve had so long the paint has rubbed off parts of the handle, is giving up the ghost and wants to take me along when it moves on to the Next World. Decide I’ll either order another one from Amazon in the morning or run up to the Target, which is where this one came from.

Examine the offerings at Amazon.

Holy shit! Have you looked at the price of irons lately? Check this thing out ! What do they think it’s made of? A hundred and twelve bucks, marked down from TWO HUNDRED BUCKS, for a freaking steam iron?

I had a Rowenta at one point, back in the day when I had a job and could afford to spend too much on stuff like this. They are very expensive irons, and they’re not worth the extra money. On mine, the cord attached at a strange angle so that you could not set it down on its heel on the ironing board while you adjusted the position of the rag you were pressing. From the looks of this one, it appears they haven’t fixed that design flaw.

Replaced it with a Sunbeam, which was cheap and functioned like a two-dollar cookstove: it got so damn hot I couldn’t hold onto the handle. Out with that.

Had a Black & Decker at one point. Don’t recall what was wrong with that, but I didn’t like it, either. I think it crapped out early on.

Then I got a Shark, and I’ve really loved it. It gets hot quickly, it steams efficiently, it does the job, it does not singe your hands. The only complaint I have is the God DAMNED automatic shut-off, which turns the thing off every time you leave the room to go to the toilet or pour yourself a cup of coffee. That, however, is apparently Big Brother’s doing, not the manufacturer’s.

But evidently the quality of Shark steam irons has collapsed. Even the ones with five stars at Amazon are roundly hated by upwards of 25% of buyers. So…that is not a good thing.

Tried to track down irons made in the USA. Couldn’t find a trace of ary a one. Searched for irons made in Germany: yeah, Rowenta. Moving on.

The only iron available at Costco goes for an astonishing $130. For an iron????? What do they think it’s made of?

That’s cheaper than the identical model at Amazon, where it goes for an eye-opening $150.

Apparently all affordable irons — by that we mean those in the $30 to $50 range — are now made in China. Thank you very much, honored leaders and globalization enthusiasts.

So I figured I’d drive up to the Fry’s market on the fringe of Richistan, whose offerings in the small household appliance dept rival or exceed Target’s and whose location does not require me to dodge bums and purse-snatchers between the car and the entrance.

{cringe!}

I do not want to go out. I’ve got a lot of other things to do today. The prospect of driving across the city is never pleasurable, and having to put a lot of other chores in abeyance to run out and shop for a steam iron is…well…UGH.

So before getting washed up to go charging out into the traffic, I decided to plug that iron into a different outlet. Could it be possible that the issue had something to do with the power strip? (Not bloody likely…but I’ve got nothin’ better to do…) Schlep into the bathroom, stick its plug into an outlet, and turn it to Blowtorch.

Hm. No bzzzt effect.

But it has no water in its tank.

Pour in a cupful of water. Turn it back on to Blowtorch.

Nothing. No indication whatsoever that the thing is getting ready to electrocute me.

So. I don’t know what caused that. The jeans I was pressing were sopping wet — fresh out of the washer. Some time back, I learned you can iron jeans while they’re soaking wet, hang them up damp, and have them come out looking the same as if you waited until they were dry to iron them. Maybe ironing soaking wet fabric with an electric appliance is ill-advised?

WhatEVER. I’ll try ironing the other three pair of (dry) jeans that await my attention, and if the thing doesn’t threaten to electrocute me, it goes back into its accustomed place in the linen closet. Thank goodness.

Can you believe that price on the only iron available at Costco?

Lately, I’ve found myself patronizing Costco a great deal less than normal. And I’ve also found that I seem to be spending a lot less than I usually do during the course of a month.

True, the refrigerator is pretty much bare (makes it easier to clean the thing…). But I’m not out of food: there’s plenty of meat, fish, chicken, and veggies to sustain me and the pooches.

The problem with Costco is that it’s Impulse Buy Hell. No matter how determined I am to stick to a shopping list, I can not get out of that place without buying something I hadn’t planned on buying. And that ratchets up the spending fast.

Without benefit of Costco, I’ve only charged up $243 on the Visa card; only $640 on AMEX.

Before Costco dumped AMEX, about $1200 was typical. So the Visa bill is showing, effectively, nothing but Costco charges. The only non-Costco charge this month was a bag of expensive organic zooom-bah dog food. So that’s a total of $880 in household shopping costs for November. So…about $400 less than usual. Hmmm…

So I think it’s a good idea to restrict trips to Costco: go there to buy only those things you can’t easily get somewhere else.

  1. The lifetime supplies of paper goods are beyond convenient.
  2. The bags of pecans: you can’t get fresher pecans this side of the tree itself.
  3. The incredibly cheap boned chicken legs, with which to make dog food.
  4. The pricey but outrageously convenient bags of frozen fish steaks.
  5. The bottomless bag of chocolate chips.
  6. The giant bag of mixed veggies, with which to make dog food.
  7. The flats of apples, priced within reason.
  8. The boxes of berries.
  9. And of course, the Costco jeans!

When you come right down to it, though…that ain’t much. Just about everything else can be purchased in regular grocery stores.

Problem with the lifetime supplies is that by definition, one such purchase should last you for a long, long time. But you find yourself buying lifetime supplies every time you go into the place. And if you go in there four times during a month, as I did in October, then you buy enough stuff to last four lifetimes.

Another Retail Shop Bites the Dust

by

Does it seem to you that even MORE retail stores are going out of business than ever before?

Of course, there’s all the mall closings, which we know about: Sears, Penney’s, Macy’s going down like dinosaurs in a meteor crash. But now the trend seems to be reaching smaller specialty stores.

Drove over to the Tuesday Morning store about two miles from here and discovered, LO! An empty space where the shop used to be.

That’s too bad, because it was a cool little store. I think they consign things that don’t sell in a timely manner at larger retailers, so there’s a lot of nifty housewares in there, bedding, and even nice area rugs. Well….there was a lot.

I’d gone over there to try to buy a wall clock and a couple of pillows. My faithful old battery-run clock, the one that’s run for a good 20 years or more, fell off the garage wall and broke. Meanwhile, two very cheap pillows were needed for a little DIY project that’s under way.

The recent junket to the vet’s office through 110-degree heat reminded me that the damn Venza was NOT designed for dogs. Holy sh!t, what was I thinking when I bought that thing?

You can fold the back row of seats down, all right. Though they don’t lie flat(!), it’s good enough for government work. I guess. BUT…the result is a big gap behind the front seat, where the stupid back seats don’t fold flush against the front seats. The back seats do not scoot forward, so you can’t adjust them to close up the space. If I have to stop short with a dog in the back, the dog is going to fly forward and tumble into one of those holes. If the car is going very fast, the dog is going to get hurt; even below freeway speeds, enough momentum will break legs and sprain backs and break teeth.

With the seat backs up, the only remotely safe way to carry the dogs without wrestling them into cages, there’s no freaking air conditioning in the space the dogs have to occupy. Can you believe it? There’s only one tiny AC vent for back passengers!

How could I not have noticed that when I was test-driving it? How? Because I imagined Toyota’s designers have common sense. That seems to be something they took leave of sometime after they built the 2000 Sienna, which had four back AC vents. Stupidly, I imagined they would run AC vents at ceiling level for the Venza’s backseat passengers. WTF?

So the dogs cook when I have to drive them someplace in the summertime. The only way to protect them from the risk of overheating is to expose them to the risk of broken bones. Or worse.

M’hijito came up with an idea: Stuff pillows down into the hole. Excellent!

Conveniently, the two cheap pillows I’d bought at Tuesday Morning were wretchedly uncomfortable to sleep on, so I’d stashed them away. In that stash, too, were three very old and grungy pillows that could also be sacrificed for this project.

These worked to fill the space between the back and front seats, but they still left enough of a drop that a dog might get hurt or stuck if she fell in there. So I needed two more cheap uncomfortable pillows. Where better to get them than Tuesday Morning, source of the original cheap uncomfortable pillows?

So I was kinda shocked and annoyed to find the place GONE. Only alternatives — a Bed Bath & Beyond at the Colonnade and a Target way to hell and gone down by the Costco — are further away than I feel like driving in today’s heat. So what does that leave?

Yeah. Amazon.

You can’t go home again…

 

Ya Can’t Shovel Heat!

by

Gosh, what a gorgeous morning!

When the hounds rousted me out of the sack around 5:30 this morning, the thermometer in back measured just under 80 degrees. Beautiful morning!

Tidied the pool a bit — an Algae Wars maneuver — and then went swimming. 🙂

The Algae Wars are going well. The human may not be winning, exactly, but a sort of détente has been arrived at. Sweeping the walls or, more fun, getting into the drink and washing them down with the sprayer is beating back the little green critters, even though the water is now about as warm as it’s going to get. Algae love warm water!

So does the human. With a very small amount of daily attention — like, about 10 minutes’ worth — the human has managed to reclaim the pool from the plant life.

It’s 8:30 now and I’m still on the back porch, soaking up the lovely outdoors and swilling an extra cup or two of coffee. Soon, very soon, I must get to work: yesterday had planned to read six pages of the clients’ abstruse magnum opus (having read ahead six pages the day before), but by the time I sat down to work, I was so tired I couldn’t focus on it. So now must get through 12 pages of Chinese-accented academicese so the result can be proofed tomorrow and then sent off to the professors.

The water bill is going to be astronomical this month. During the warmest summer months, I set the watering system to run through its entire cycle every day. This results in water bills that match or exceed the power bills, which as you can imagine are themselves pretty bracing. But as the heat has hovered around 118 to 120, I’ve trotted out around noon or 1 p.m. and pushed the button to run all cycles manually for about 15 or 20 minutes, by way of keeping the greenery alive.

Oh well… It’s only money.

Speaking of astronomical, yesterday a friend and I decided to kill the day exploring Scottsdale Fashion Square, the elegant mall she and I have both drifted away from.

Well…lemme tellya something. Most normal malls indeed are dying, no question of it. But the ones that target the One Percent? Thriving!

You never saw so many rich bitches and overpriced teenagers in your LIFE! The devil may wear Prada, but so does Mrs. Gotrock’s daughter.

And yes, the rich are different from us. (In some cases it’s questionable whether they’re even human: just look at the critters in the White House.)

They eat in food courts, though, so my friend and I grabbed a Pita Jungle lunch and watched the scene go by. We reflected on the latest styles and colors: hevvin help us, what is HOT now is a throwback to 1969: every store is full of hippy-dippy outfits. On steroids.

Some of the stuff is very pretty. And…yes…forgive me, Father, but I have sinned blown away three months’ worth of my budget. 🙂

We went into a hilariously wonderful store called Johnny We. This outfit sells the most gorgeous shirts you can imagine. They’re embroidered, not printed. And elaborately embroidered.

Some of them are a little much, but many rank in the Top This, You Bitches! category. 😀

So there we are with our working-class noses pressed against the window, pining for an embroidered shirt or a purse that costs as much as a Mazerati, when what should we find hidden in the back of the store behind a partition but a couple racks of picked-over merchandise: 30% off!

Hot damn!

This image does not do it justice, thanks to the Mac’s stupid new software. Click for a larger picture…i hope…

We found this filmy cream-colored shirt with café-au-lait and champagne-colored embroidery all over it. With cutwork, if you can imagine! Thirty percent off! Yes yes yes YES!

It’s so, so, so pretty. Even with just a pair of jeans, it’ll be a jaw-dropper.

Not since I was married to the Corporate Lawyer have I spent so much money on a single piece of clothing. Holy mackerel!

Now I’m in the market for a pair of leggings in brown (preferably) or beige. Looks like one can order them from Amazon, but I really don’t like ordering clothes online: too much of a pig in a poke.

So anyway, over lunch we sang the “Where Have All the Shopping Malls Gone” song. And we concluded that the middle class, people who used to support the chain stores that populated the Metrocenters and the Paradise Valley Malls of yore, has essentially gone away. Neither she nor I shop in malls anymore because we can’t afford to shop in malls. And, as the old stand-by stores’ customer base has slipped, so has their customer service. It’s no longer fun to shop in those stores.

She remarked that she used to buy her clothes in Penney’s all the time, and I said I always bought kitchen and household gear at Sears. But now when you go into those stores, the hired help treats you like they wish you would please just go away. Stores like Dillard’s, Nordstrom’s, and Macy’s are affordable only on sale (and Macy’s customer service sucks, too).

Once I would buy cooking and household tchotchkes at Crate & Barrel, Restoration Hardware, Williams-Sonoma, Dillard’s, Macy’s and the like. Now I buy that kind of stuff at Costco or Target — or, more often, order it from Amazon. Used to buy furniture at Crate & Barrel or Macy’s. Now if I can’t find it at an estate sale, I don’t buy it.

Welp, it’s getting warm out here. Damnable “El Capitan” has crashed the MacBook TWICE while I’ve been writing this post, so I guess it’s time to knock off and go to work. On a different computer, thank you very much.

Next computer is gonna be a PC…

The Most Expensive Grocery Store in Town?

by

For a brief shining moment, it looked very much like the winner of for Most Expensive Grocery Store in Town Prize was…not AJ’s (gourmet central). Not Safeway (two-for-one sale, wherein the first item’s price is inflated). Not Albertson’s. Not Costco (Home of the Impulse Buy). Not Trader Joe’s. Nay, not even Whole Foods!

Where could you buy a pound of apples for $7.++ per pound? Walmart!

I stood there staring at those Pink Ladies and thought…they must have mixed platinum powder into the fertilizer.

But no. Below the sign and hidden on the lip of the apple bin was a sticker claiming their price worked out 12.8 cents an ounce. There being 16 ounces in a pound: $.128 x 16 = $2.05 a pound.

That’s pretty cheap compared to the four bucks or so requested at AJ’s for premium apples. Oh, well. AJ’s had some exotic apple variety I’d never heard of, something called Koru. So we traded two $2.00 Pink Ladies (an excellent choice) for a $4 Koru.

Unfortunately, the Walmart didn’t have any of the dog food that I went up there to buy, hoping to avoid a lengthy trip to a more upscale store that carries the ridiculously expensive product that is the only thing I’ll feed the corgis when I don’t feel up for making their food.

So, I was going to have to traipse way to hell and gone down to AJ’s anyway, which sells the dog food for about $13 a roll, a buck more than Walmart charges, when Walmart has the stuff.

However… AJ’s has the advantage that it sells a very fine ready-made beef lasagne. Happening to be half-starved, I bought one helping, enough for two meals here at the Funny Farm. And naturally, a bottle of côtes du Rhone, on sale in the Summer Special.

Image: DepositPhotos, © korovin