Coffee heat rising

Shopping

Is Costco worth its new membership fee?

by

It’s official: Costco is raising its membership fee to sixty bucks. Well…they were pushing it when they jacked up their fee the last time. IMHO, $60 is a little much.

This very afternoon I went over there to buy gas and pick up some pork and chicken to make dog food. And I found myself questioning: why am I paying to shop here?

The Visa card I got to finesse Costco’s changeover to Obnoxious Citibank doesn’t give a kickback on gasoline. The new non-Costco, no-annual-fee AMEX card does — 3 percent. But you can’t use it at Costco, obviously. So I might as well buy gas at the QT up the road, instead of driving all the way down to Spectral Mall — the AMEX kickback would cut the cost to about what Costco is charging. Maybe less, even.

I’m finding that I’m spending an enormous amount less in Costco these days. Without the frequent Costco trips — and despite shopping a lot at Whole Foods, AJ’s, and Safeway — the AMEX bill was only $396. Haven’t seen the Visa bill yet, but estimate it’ll be around $400, too. That’s a total of $800, which is $200 to $400 less than I’ve been in the habit of spending per month. That is such a huge saving that it about covers the cost of the dreadful car payment.

So…why AM I paying to shop there, and is it worth it?

  1. They have a great selection of electronics and a generous return policy.
  2. Speaking of returns, except for electronics, they’ll take almost anything back and give you a full refund.
  3. They carry good quality pork and chicken in bulk, at excellent prices — well below what I can get for comparable stuff in grocery stores, and in large enough quantities that a single package will make a week’s worth of dog food.
  4. I love their blue jeans.
  5. They have the cheapest propane in town.
  6. You can’t beat their tire shop. Discount Tire used to be competitive, but it’s not anymore.
  7. It’s hard to beat their price on chlorine tablets.
  8. They sell Campari tomatoes (the only fresh tomatoes in US markets that taste like real tomatoes, IMHO), and they sell them in large quantities.
  9. Their maple syrup is cheaper than anyone else’s.
  10. Their pecans and walnuts come in giant packages, and they’re fresher than anyone else’s.
  11. It’s hard to find the “Tuscan” blend of  frozen mixed veggies that have no garlic or onion in them (dog food, again).
  12. Prices on wine, beer, and hard liquor are excellent.

Worth it? Worth it? Hmmm…

Electronics: how often do you buy electronics, really? I’ve bought one (1) printer in the past four or five years. Costco doesn’t carry Macs (though I’m exasperated enough with Wyrd for Mac just now that I probably will replace the MacBook with a PC). Moot that, then.

Dog food: that IS big. It’s virtually impossible to buy human-grade meats in bulk anywhere else in town, certainly not for the prices Costco charges. I could switch the dogs over to commercial dog food. That would relieve me of hassle and expense…and it would shorten the dogs’ lives.

Blue  jeans: you can order Gloria Vanderbilts from Amazon.

Propane: it would take you the better part of your lifetime to make up one annual $60 membership on the amount you save on refilling at Costco rather than at U-Haul. And U-Haul is right around the corner, not halfway to freaking Anthem!

Chlorine: ditto. Leslie’s doesn’t charge that much more for a gigantic pail of chlorine tabs.

Tires: that’s big. Very, very big. Their warrantee is excellent, their service can’t be beat, and their costs are…within reason. I’ve gotten some excellent deals on Costco tires over the years.

Campari tomatoes: Safeway carries them. Just buy two or three containers at once.

Pecans and walnuts: big, very big. I love nuts, and I do not enjoy them stale. The only other place you can get them in quantities as large as Costco sells is at Trader Joe’s, and Trader’s bulk pecans and walnuts are usually stale.

Tuscan-style mixed veggies: available at Fry’s and Walmart.

Maple syrup: you can’t afford to buy it anywhere else. But it is, after all, a form of sugar. Although it’s one of the best sources of calcium around, one could probably do without it. Should probably do without it.

Booze: Total Wine charges the same and has a larger selection. And they have sommeliers who will steer you to the best of all possible $9 wines.

So we have the dog meat, the delicious (fresh!!) nuts in bulk, the tires, and the maple syrup. And the fact that by and large the produce they carry is superior to many grocery stores’ offerings.

Hm.

I wonder if my son and I could split a membership, claiming that we occupy the same household. We do own the house downtown in tandem. That would cut our respective costs to $60 apiece.

He was on my membership when he was a young pup, but now apparently they’re charging him as much as they’re charging me. I’ll have to ask him if he’d like to cancel whatever he’s got and throw in with me to get a cheaper deal.

Otherwise…if not…well… It may be time to say good-bye to Costco.

How much are you willing to pay for the privilege of shopping at Costco?

DONE with Macy’s! Why…?

by

Lemme tellya why…

So having decided the thing to do with an unexpected free day was to schlep across the city to the Macy’s at Arrowhead Mall — which, unlike their store within reasonable driving distance of my house, carries furniture — and buy a mattress on sale such as this one (sale price $249) or this one, ($349; either of them available with so-called “white glove delivery”), I get in my car, drive until I’m blue in the face, park, and make my way through the hectic, noisy shopping center to said department store.

Easily navigating to the furniture department, I find a saleslady who’s chatting casually with a woman who may or may not be a potential customer. They don’t seem to be talking business. At any rate, she pauses long enough to ask if she can help me.

I say, “I’m looking for an inexpensive twin-size mattress set for a guest bedroom.”

She gestures vaguely in the direction of the mattress section and says, “They’re down there against the far wall.”

Uhm…Lady, I reflect, I don’t need you to point in the direction of a roomful of mattresses and tell me that’s where the mattresses are. Why did you bother to ask if you could help me?

She her companion resume their chat.

I explore the far end of the mattress room. The best price available is “on sale” for $699.

Ohhhkay, I figure…next stop: Penney’s.

As I walk out, disgusted, she pauses the chatfest again to ask if I saw what I wanted. When I say no, she says, well, they’re back there! And gestures again to the far end of the room.

Maybe I missed something, I think. So I go back and look at all the mattresses on the floor, in the area where she was pointing me. The cheapest model was $699, on sale.

The two women don’t even bother to quit yakking as I walk out of the department.

Penney’s and Sears are all the way at the other end of this huge shopping mall. That’s good though: since I’m wasting my time with this trip instead of walking the dogs, at least I’m getting some exercise.

Sears has a saleslady who wants to sell me something, but unfortunately they have no twin-size mattresses that fill the bill. The only ones that come as a mattress/box spring set are kid-size.

Penney’s? Just effin’ hopeless. There is NO sales help on the floor, and it’s impossible to tell where the mattress department is, or even if they have one.

Well, I had no high hopes for Penney’s or Sears, both of which are pretty marginal as department stores go.

But you’d expect better of Macy’s, wouldn’t you?

Or not.

This is not the first time I’ve been unable to persuade a Macy’s sales rep to sell me something when I came in ready to buy, credit card gripped in my sweaty little paw.

Last time, I still had boobs. Indeed, I wanted to buy a brassiere. I wanted one that was not underwired and not made with a pair of styrofoam Dixie cups and not a sports bra. Just an ordinary goddamn bra, like…oh, you remember, Wacoal? Maybe Bali? I’d even have taken a Maidenform, if they had one that fit. And if it didn’t have underwires or Dixie cups.

In the lingerie department, I found another customer, similarly befuddled: we both searched through rack on rack on rack of lookalike junk Dixie-cup brassieres, all pretty much identical except for their prices. There was ONE saleslady in this department.

She was a young thing: maybe just post-high school, or a college undergrad. She was surrounded by a gaggle of young things who were obviously her friends. They chattered and laughed and fiddled with their phones together, while she paid exactly ZERO attention to her department. She clearly did not give one thin damn whether any customers ever bought anything from Macy’s — except perhaps to the extent that she evidently wished we would not, because that would interrupt her socializing.

Neither the other prospective buyer nor I could get this kid’s attention.

I walked out, disgusted. As I walked out today, disgusted.

Two’s a charm: I will never go back to Macy’s again. Period.

Went by the mattress store that used to reside in the Sprouts shopping center down the road: closed.

So that’s it, I guess. It looks like I’ll have to figure out something else to do with the spare room. A guest bedroom, it ain’t a-gonna be.

And what exactly I’m going to do when I need a new mattress & box springs for myself, I can’t imagine. Whatever it is, it won’t come from Macy’s.

Image: DepositPhotos: © Vadimphoto

Playing off Costco against Amazon

by

Christmas treeSo there’s a specific Costco item my son said he wanted for Christmas. What rational person would not order this item, which is seasonal — NOT this season, though — from Costco Online?

Probably one more rational than moi… Naturally, I went over to the Costco website and found it. Very nice. While exploring, I found a competing device with a more interesting design and lots more space to do things with. So…I decided to order that instead of the one he specifically said he wanted.

But…I ordered too soon.

Shortly, in one of my many idle moments, I cruised over to Amazon. There I discovered…

a) The item I’d ordered is ROUNDLY panned by Amazon reviewers. It’s not just disliked. It is passionately hated. Takes four hours to assemble. Falls apart forthwith. Junk, trash, and debris!

b) The specific item M’hito craves — brand name, size, model number and all — is available at Amazon for FIFTEEN BUCKS less than Costco was asking. And it gets 4.5 out of 5 stars from reviewers.

Naturally, I now order the doodad that he wants from Amazon. Then I go over to Costco and try to cancel the thing I’ve ordered there.

Discover I can’t. I mean, I can, but it ain’t workin’. Takes a day and a half before a response comes from Costco, which is basically “sorreeeee.” Wait till it shows up and then drive it down to Costco to return it.

The Amazon item showed up, via the U.S. Postal Service, the next day after I ordered it. The Costco thing just showed this afternoon, a full week later.

So, in another half an hour or so, I’m going to schlep this damn thing down to Costco. Good riddance to it.

In the convenience department, then: Costco has got one HECKUVA lot to learn from Amazon.

And in the consumerist department: I’m brought back to the feeling that one of the best things about Amazon is those consumer reviews.

If I hadn’t gone over to Amazon and glanced at the consumer ratings, then read the reviews, I would never have tumbled to the fact that what looked like a better product than the one my son had asked for was really a piece of junk. There were one or two reviews for each product at Costco; at Amazon, both of them had a lot of reviews.

And when there are a lot of reviews, that’s when you start to get good information. Just a few really good reviews usually indicates the seller is putting friends or employees up to posting raves; a few really bad ones suggest the competition is trying to trash the seller. But a whole lot of reviews, with plenty in the 3- and 4-star categories, usually will tell you what you need to know about a product.

That makes Amazon a valuable resource, IMHO. With Consumer Reports not very useful anymore — many of their reviews appear to be driven by various agendas, and often their top-rated items are junk — Amazon’s customer reviews are probably about as close to real consumer experience as you’re gonna get.

 

Don’t wanna work Tuesday meets the Green Thumb Lady

by

Asparagus_officinalis0bHm. The attitude seems not to have improved much since yesterday. Tsk tsk!

However, the house is ridiculously clean. The trash is hauled out. The pool has been backwashed. The new composter has been fed. And this morning I speedwalked something in excess of two miles.

LOL! If exercise were good for you, wouldn’t you think I’d feel less crabby?

Quick run to the grocer to pick up ONLY what was on the accrued list: $22 worth. Not bad. If I could stay out of Costco, I think, except for maybe one or at most two runs per month, a great deal of cash would be saved.

Here’s th’thing: Remember that food windfall, the one that struck at the beginning of the month? Well, it took the better part of a day and a half to cook all that stuff up and stash it in the freezers.

But I’m STILL EATING IT!

And it’s still awesome. Had some of the eggplant lasagne this morning. Right now I’m waiting for some spaghetti to get limp, so I can dump the rest of the home-made delicious tomato sauce over it, with a few olives.

Yesterday I reheated some grilled summer squash on the grill next to a slab of defrosted Costco salmon — great! Several of the pretty little stuffed acorn squash are still in the freezer — one piece of those is enough for a full meal, especially when served with a salad.

The vegetable soup is BEYOND awesome when you heat a few frozen scallops with it. That’s as in “deliciousness that defies belief.” I’ve tried it with some shrimp, too: also good, but not as amazing as scallops.

There’s still a little of the gazpacho, whose flavor seems to improve with aging in the fridge.

Truth to tell, I’ve had to buy relatively little food for myself this month. Of course, as we know we still have the stock of frozen meat and fish unearthed when I cleaned the freezer. That won’t last forever. But for the nonce, it’s supplementing all those veggies very handsomely.

It looks a great deal to me like I probably will have to buy no more or almost no more food for the rest of the month. So even though I’m about to exceed this month’s grocery-store budget, it may not be by much.

Stumbling around the Safeway’s produce department this ayem, I come upon an unprepossessing lady. We inspect the asparagus. I turn up my nose: it’s too mature, too fat. She says it’s perfect. Each to her own, think I.

But then…oh, yes…THEN she remarks that the asparagus in her garden looks like these spears.

What?

Say what?

I think she’s talking about a winter garden and start to talk about my plans for this fall. No. It quickly becomes clear that she is talking about asparagus that is growing in her garden right this effing minute

Yeah? Holy sh!t, I think. She forgot to take her meds this morning! My mother grew up on a dirt farm in upstate New York, a place where snow fell extravagantly when she was a child. She used to talk about going into the forest in the springtime to harvest wild asparagi. I figure that means asparagus grows in cool to temperate climates.

My new acquaintance continues. She explains that she gardens in moveable containers, allowing her to shift various vegetables venues as the weather changes. She moves the “roots,” as she calls the underground part of these creatures, into the shade as summer is y-cumin’ in.

We continue to chat. We discover that neither of us can get a decent tomato to grow in North Central, even though we both were able to elicit magnificent tomatoes in other parts of town. We concur in thinking this to be suspicious.

I learn that she grows a LOT of amazing stuff in containers that she can move with the seasons. And I think…yeah.

At home, I discover that by God, you can grow asparagus in Arizona. WHO KNEW?

How can I count the ways that I can’t wait until the new compost is composted and the weather cools off enough to start digging up the ground and dumping dirt in pots?

Meanwhile, though, werk awaits, oh god how i hate werking.

This book marketing stuff is every bit as boring, as pointless, and as frustrating as teaching freshman comp. But adjunct teaching at least pays almost minimum wage.

I spent about half the day posting ads for the upcoming book sales, which start July 21. To wit:

Cookbook

Naughty June 2016

I’ve stuck these up on every electronic pillar and post I can think of: that would be eight or nine (I’ve lost count) Facebook groups, Twaddle, and my own fine blogsites.

Interestingly a surprising number of friends and total strangers have “liked” and (better yet) “retweeted” or “shared” the things. So I hope against hope that maybe someone will buy the stuff. We’ll find out. And we’ll believe it when we see it. 😀

Getting these things online is frustrating, annoying, and (as usual) effing time-consuming, because no two FB sites are the same. On one, you can post the URL and the desired image will pop right up. On another, no image will come up, so you have to go click-search-click-search-click-click-click-ad-nauseam-search-click-click to get jpeg up. On yet another, an image will come up but will be decidely NOT the goddamn image you want, so you’ll have to delete that image (without deleting the damn post) and go click-search-click-search-click-click-click-ad-nauseam-search-click-click to get correct jpeg up.

All of this is, shall we say, infinitely annoying, boring, and stupid. It feels especially stupid because you suspect that sinking four or five of your $60 hours into this endeavor will reward you with cash receipts of approximately $1.09.

Just share the damn things, will you puhleeeze?

Reading the national and international gnus is one long aggravation. I hope you’ve been duly entertained by the Trump doxie’s plagiarism of Mrs. Obama’s 2008 speech. Please, God: pour me another bourbon and water…

Incompetence, crookedness, and a total vacancy of ethics notwithstanding, the currently incompetent, crooked, and vacant Republican Party has made Bozo the Clown its nominee for President of the United States of America.

One more b&w, please, Mr. God?

Oh sh!t. Il faut cultiver notre jardin.

 

Thank You, Costco and Citigroup!

by

Hot dang! Costco’s move to annoying CitiGroup is going to cut my monthly Costco budget at least in half, and maybe by as much as three-fourths!

Remember how much I guessed I’d have to spend on today’s Costco junket, to pick up meat for the dogs and a few things for myself that I can’t easily find elsewhere? It was ridiculous, as you’ll recall — I guessed that the giant packages of chicken and the pork would each cost about 30 bucks; $15 for the restaurant-sized package of frozen veggies; maybe $10 per package of Campari tomatoes and of Mexican mangoes.

Well. That was all so majorly wrong. Wrong wrong wrong! The chicken came to about $13; seventeen pounds (!!!) of pork, $35.55; the mangoes and the tomatoes, each $4.49.

Now, I did expend the $95 projected for this trip, but only because for the first time since the memory of Fat Lady runneth not to the contrary, the store happened to have a pair of white Gloria Vanderbilt jeans in size 10.

It has literally been years since any of the Costco stores I habituate has had a size 10 pair of Glorias that fit, in white. I know, because every goddamn time I go into one of those stores, I search for them. So, add $14.99: come up with a total, including tax, of $94.23.

Costco Run 7-15-2016

This means the real cost of buying only the food items needed for this trip was about $77.

You realize…that’s about half the $150/month dedicated to Costco in the new budget.

Budget 6-2016 2

And, since the amount budgeted for Costco shopping in the New Regime is itself half the average I found I’ve been spending of late, $77 is a little more than a quarter of the amount I’ve been diddling away in Costco.

Think of that…

A 75% saving on household goods, food, and (monumental) impulse buys, just because Costco switched from AMEX to the dreadful, impossible CitiGroup as vendor for their in-house credit card.

Their loss, my gain.

🙂

I must say, I’d forgotten how annoying and stress-inducing it is to have to write a check while standing in line at a cash register. It’s been a long time since I’ve paid for anything with anything other than a credit card or direct bill-pay.

Shopping at Costco is aversive to start with. It’s crowded, the lines are endless, the insulting shoplift check at the door makes you want to bite someone…ugh. That’s exaggerated at the store nearest to me by cultural issues having to do with personal space: for a middle-class white American female, it really isn’t a very comfortable place to shop.  That’s why, whenever I can swing it, I’ll shop Costco in other parts of town. Not that I don’t love my fellow shoppers, but that I really do dislike people climbing up my rear end or parking their carts crosswise across the aisle so I have to turn around, go all the way to the start of the aisle, go all the way down the next aisle, and then come halfway back into the original aisle to get to the merchandise I want to buy.

Sociologically it’s interesting and amusing; time-wise and patience-wise, it ain’t.

So add to that the slight — but significant — extra hassle of having to write a check, and I find myself thinking “no, thanks.”

I’ve paid my Costco membership for this year. We will see if it seems like a $50 fee for the privilege of shopping there is worth paying.

The truth is, the things I can’t easily get anyplace else — a whole package of those wonderful mangoes; massive amounts of chicken, pork, and appropriate veggies suitable for processing into dog food; giant packages of high-quality pecans, walnuts, and pine nuts; lifetime supplies of paper goods; the incredible maple syrup at the incredible price; the smokin’ deal on gasoline; the beloved tire shop; the cheap propane — may not really add up to $50 worth of easy shopping or $50 worth of savings on gas and junk.

At any rate, given the hassle involved in writing checks and the general PITA it is to shop there under the best of conditions, you may be sure I won’t be running into Costco every time the whim strikes: not anymore.

I’m hoping to keep the Costco runs down to one a month, ideally; two at most. And if I only spend about $75 or $80 on each such trip…jeez. Costco’s CitiBank debacle will be my profit, to the tune of about $150 to to $225 a month!