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Shopping

Researching the Next Dishwasher Purchase

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Last night I spent the entire evening studying dishwashers on the Internet. Couldn’t get into Consumer Reports, but decided not to pony up the toll to get past the paywall because in the past I’ve found some of their reviews for big-ticket items to be not altogether reliable. However, I was able to break into a few CR reviews by googling [dishwasher name] and [reviews].  Good Housekeeping, however, has what appears to be a good set of appliance reviews, and I’ve found Amazon reviews usually give one a fair clue if there are a decent number of three-, four-, or five-star reviews (indicating the product’s manufacturer hasn’t salted the reviews with raves, or if so, enough real people are reporting to give you some facts).

Here’s what I came up with:

GE  Profile

• DWT480RSS: among top-rated by Good Housekeeping
• Amazon: Interior racks are widely disliked. The top-of-the-line model, which seems to be discontinued, was liked by one consumer who said to avoid lower-end models.
• Elsewhere, complaints of bad customer service.
• High cost; people say they had to replace within a couple of years.
• Consumer Reports likes, but the price is out of sight: over $1200!

Asko DO NOT BUY

• D5122xx1 among top-rated by Good Housekeeping
• No reviews at Amazon – caution!
• New corporate ownership in 2012 – caution!
• Three hour run time! Holy sh!t. No way to cancel & switch cycles; no low rinse aid indicator.

Kenmore Elite PROBABLY NOT

• Ultra Wash 665.1394 among top-rated by Good Housekeeping
• Extremely poor customer service reported
• MANY bad reviews at Amazon, including motors falling out!! Leaking, not cleaning, flooring destroyed, need for repairs on new machines, bad customer service.

KitchenAid Superba DO NOT BUY

• KUDS30IVSS among top-rated by Good Housekeeping
• Poor customer service reported
• MANY very bad reviews at Amazon!
• KUDS30FXSS well reviewed at Reviewed.com: excels at cleaning; however, commenters complain about it.
• CAUTION: Kitchenaid is now made by Maytag/Whirlpool.
• To avoid: “The other, more recent KitchenAid is the KDFE454CSS. It costs $50 more than the Bosch, but actually does a worse job at cleaning.”
• Can’t be flush-mounted to cabinets because of heated drying system

Miele: DO NOT BUY

• Not enough reviews on Amazon to tell, but the Crystal Series does not score well.
• Consumer Reports calls it “middling” and prefers the Bosch Ascenta SHX3AR7[5]UC,

Bosch

• Has an A- with Good Housekeeping; in general Americans dislike the no-drying feature
•  Has pretty good reviews at Amazon but not many reviewers. The SHX98M09UC 800 is NOT well-liked. Complaints about odors. Complaints about customer service. One reviewer appears to be stupid, but others seem sane.
• Elsewhere, other complaints about odors (possibly from mold resulting from people leaving dishes sitting in closed washer for several days after running cycle — obviously, if you leave wet dishes in the closed, unvented machine, they’re going to stink). One commenter felt the newer model has dropped so much in quality they would have been better off repairing the old washer.
• Caution: A new feature is a stainless steel tub with a plastic floor!

Looks like the Bosch is the least bad of a mediocre bunch. Planned obsolescence – sometimes leading to breakdowns after just a couple of years – and poor customer service are pretty much universal.  The Kenmore may be pretty good when parts aren’t falling out, but customer service is universally reviled. Lowe’s service is also disliked, by employees as well as consumers. Spencer’s has large numbers of positive reviews but these may be fake, and the nearest store is too far away.

For its astronomical price tag, the Asko brings you a three-hour wash cycle — to my mind the Bosch’s 100-plus-minute cycle is quite long enough.

Sadly, the once-grand KitchenAid seems to have dropped drastically in quality — consumer comments record rant after rant after enraged rant about shoddy construction and shoddy service — probably because it’s now made by Maytag/Whirlpool. I will not buy a Maytag (Whirlpool) product.

The Kenmore, which also used to be a great machine, will bring you Sears’s famously bad customer service, something I really don’t want to deal with. Plus it, too, apparently is suffering with some quality control issues. They recalled a recent model because its motor was falling out onto the floor, flooding the owner’s home — in many cases destroying expensive flooring or leaking through to the basement and wrecking the ceiling there. Unfortunately, they failed to tell the customers about the recall, so many people registering bitter complaints here, there, and everywhere on the Internet were NOT TOLD of the recall! In some cases, people’s insurance would not cover the damage — one consumer is filing a lawsuit against Sears and his home insurance carrier. In other precincts, even those with intact motors leak.

So this leaves us with the Bosch or the GE Profile.

Consumer reviews indicate that the lower-end GE washers are to be avoided, and even the high-end models ($1200+!!) evidently are engineered to crap out quickly. A number of reviewers spoke of major repairs within a couple of years.

The Bosch also may have fallen off some in quality. One consumer remarked that he wished they’d paid to fix their old Bosch, which was a better machine than the one they bought to replace it. This year Bosch has introduced a model with stainless-steel walls but a plastic floor, something to be avoided. If this is a characteristic of the $700-and-less models, it may actually be better to just get the present machine fixed.

Or…not. It makes a perfectly fine, gigantic drying rack for hand-washed dishes.

Dishwashers retain a small pool of water at the bottom to keep a gasket lubricated. But if repairing the thing is not cost-effective and new ones are outrageously expensive and engineered to crap out, then it may be better to shop-vac the mosquito nest out of the Bosch and just resign myself to washing dishes by hand. Or pony up $350 to fix it and hope it runs another year or so.

I really do need to buy a new pool cleaner — Harvey’s hoses are sucking air, never having been replaced during the entire eight or nine years I’ve lived here. A new set of Hayward hoses costs almost as much as the entire unit, so I might as well get a new one: $325 plus almost 10% tax. I can’t afford that on top of a $500 to $800 hit for a dishwasher.

Cleaning the pool manually is one hell of a lot more work than washing a few dishes two or three times a day — and it hurts the spavined back a hell of a lot more than standing in front of the sink long enough to rinse off a few plates and glasses. Given a choice…maybe I’d rather get the pool equipment running right than have an overpriced dishwasher calculated to need replacement in less than seven years.

Second Thoughts: The Benefits (uhm, I think…) of Waiting before Buying

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Good old SDXB loves to shop, but given that he’s a confirmed cheapskate his shopping habits are…well, interesting. He’ll go to the Base Exchange — cheap as you can get, right? K-Mart prices with no local tax. There he’ll amble contentedly up and down the aisles, gazing at all the Man Stuff (he loves tools….he loves camping gear…he loves fishing lures…he loves weapons…and because he cooks like a dream, he even loves pots and pans!). He picks up an item. He examines it. He studies it. He contemplates it. Then he puts it back on the shelf.

“If you want it,” you say, “why don’t you just go ahead and get it?”

“Maybe I will,” he says. “But whenever I find something on a shelf that I imagine I want, I pick it up, think about it, then put it back down. Then on the way out, I come back and look at it again. Sometimes by the time I get back, I’ve realized I don’t really need it.”

Saves a lot of money with that strategy. 🙂

Seriously, what it does is control impulse buys in a big way. It also prevents build-up of clutter around the house. Best of all, it forces you to think about each purchase and consider a) whether you really do need it and b) whether the specific object under consideration is the best choice.

Where big-ticket items are concerned, it’s a particularly useful technique. After you’ve examined the [car, boat, motorcycle, fridge, stove, dishwasher, spectacularly overpriced clothes washer] and heard the sales pitches and read the consumer reviews, wait! It’ll still be there in a few days. But your ardor to buy it may have cooled off enough to let you think about it more objectively.

By the middle of last week, M’hijito had made up his mind to buy the top-of-the-line Honda CRV. I really liked the vehicle, too, and had pretty well decided I would buy one — even started the process to extract funds from an old whole life policy to pay for it.

A day or so later, though, he announced that he’d changed his mind: decided to keep the junker and continue saving the equivalent of a car payment for another couple of years, so he could either pay for a new vehicle outright or have such a small loan it would take little effort to pay the thing off.

Understand: my son HATES the junker. It’s going to cost him $1700 to keep it running. That’s seventeen hundred dollars that will be dumped into a rustbucket that he loathes every time he has to get into it.

This is a man who makes SDXB look profligate.

I said, “Well, life is short, you know. It won’t hurt anything for you to get a better vehicle, and if it makes your life better, it may be worth it.”

He said he was going to look at Ford crossovers. 🙄

So the paperwork came from the insurance company — it’s going to take a week or two to disengage the cash from that outfit, and once I’ve closed out the cash value, presumably the $40,000 death benefit will go away, too.

Do I really want to get rid of an insurance policy that will pay my son 40 grand? Accountant says it’s irrelevant: he’ll inherit enough from me that he won’t need $40,000. But between you ’n’ me, I think 40 grand tax-free is not a bad little good-bye gift.

At any rate, the bureaucratic tergiversations delayed the purchase from the git-go, and then my son’s back-peddling gave me serious pause. My car is running well, should run for another 30,000 to 80,000 miles, and I don’t hate it. Hm.

Then a day or so later, my friend KJG and I get on the phone for a lengthy yakfest. One of the required topics of any conversation between old bats is the soap opera of our adult children’s lives. I brought up the automotive chapter and remarked that even though he had decided not to buy the CR-V, I still coveted one of the things. With leather seats. And lumbar support(!). And…gadgets whose purpose I have yet to understand!

She said that her daughter and son-in-law had bought a CR-V and soon traded it in. They felt it was too underpowered to meet their needs — which, since they live in a far-flung suburb, entail a lot of freeway driving.

Izzat so?

The CR-V comes with a four-banger and has no option to upgrade the engine. It’s a fairly large vehicle, and you can’t get a V-6 for it! It supposedly has a turbo-charged four, but…well. When you go back and read the Edmunds, Consumer Reports, and Car & Driver reports closely, you find every one of the reviewers remarks on the wimpy engine, every one of them complains that Honda offers no upgrade, and they all say that if a plush interior with many alluring amenities is more important than adequate power, this is the car for you.

Well. But I want both of those things.

I tend to be an assertive driver. Rarely do I rise to the level of “aggressive,” but I insist on being able to hold my own on freeways populated by homicidal maniacs. In Arizona, you need engine power for two purposes, neither of which is an option: To get yourself out of dangerous situations in high-speed traffic, and to haul your vehicle up steep grades.

The road to Yarnell is very steep, though it has a 25 mph speed limit (read “about 40 mph” if you want not to be pushed off the side by frustrated tailgaters). The freeway up the Mogollon Rim also has some pretty steep stretches, and if you can’t go at least 70 mph up the thing, you are a menace to navigation. If the point of getting a new car is so I can drive it out of town (wouldn’t think of taking the Dog Chariot up Yarnell Hill these days, nor do I relish getting stuck on the side of the I-17 halfway to Flagstaff), then I’ve gotta have a car that can make it up a steep grade with power to spare.

The Chariot does not have an especially plush interior, but it does have a 6-banger. When some bastard tries to pass me on the right on a one-lane freeway on-ramp, he gets a real surprise. The thing takes off like a rocket from a standing start and when it’s rolling, it can hold its own against anything that’s not a BMW or a Mercedes Benz.

It’s paid for.

If it runs for as many miles as Chuck the Wonder-Mechanic thinks, it will last another three to eight years.

Every year that I delay buying a new car makes it that much more likely that the next car will be the last car I’ll ever have to buy.

And if I want to scale the Mogollon Rim, renting a late-model car for a day trip would cost one helluva lot less than ponying up 25 or 30 grand to have the same vehicle take up residence in my garage.

Come to think of it, for 25 or 30 grand, I could buy a double-cab Dodge pickup, appointed like your living-room and den, with the engine of a Saturn rocket and the carrying capacity of two cross-over fake SUVs. Edmunds seems to like the Dodge better than any of its competitors.

Holeee sh!t. Lookit this beast! The damn thing has even got a file cabinet… Why on earth would anyone want a fake SUV when they could have the real McCoy, plus a place to hang the gun rack?

Car Shopping

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e-mail correspondence of the day…

Funny to SDXB, 10:21 AM:

Honda_CR-V_EX_--_07-11-2012_2My son theoretically wants to go look at cars today. He invited me to tag along, to serve as moral support against the car sales vultures.

Mine is back in the shop. Really, it’s got 124,000 miles on it…think it’s about time to get serious about replacing it. The costs though…holy SH!T! I don’t have that much saved up. And without a job and a real income, I’m not gonna get that much saved up, either. Ever.

SDXB to Funny, 1:00 PM:

Just spend the effing money, Funny, and get yourself a good sedan. I recommend the Camry.  Damn nice cars, and the gas mileage you can expect makes the deal more attractive.  Your old Sienna is beginning to nickel and dime you. Buy a reliable car now and it’ll probably last until your kid uses it to drive the ashes to wherever.

Funny to SDXB, 6:10 PM:

I’m  not nuts about the newer Camry models. They’re not roomy enough, and they suffer from the same Fordification that has begun to afflict Toyota in general..

Chuck replaced the rear brake thingies for free. But he said if that didn’t fix the squeal, then the brake drums would need to be replaced. I said if that were the case he’d be replacing the drums on a new Honda CR-V. He laughed.

Amazingly, M’hijito called yesterday and asked if I would accompany him to various dealers to test-drive candidate vehicles, whose specs, as luck would have it, happen to coincide pretty much with my own needs and desires. He didn’t want to confront car salesmen alone any more than I do…so…two’s company. As it were.

We looked at the Hyundai Tucson, Honda CR-V, the Subaru Forester and Crosstrack, and the Toyota RAV-4.

He seemed to favor the Subaru (mostly, I think, because his friends drive one and also because you can get almost all the Honda’s considerable bells & whistles in the Subaru for less money). And I’d say that for a young man who will buy several more cars during his lifetime and will be knocking around with camping, fishing, dog transport, and Home Depot adventures, the Subaru would be highly serviceable. Also, he’s thinking of moving to Wisconsin, and the Subaru comes equipped with a standard anti-skid feature that will pull the car out of a skid on ice. So we’re told. There’s room to install a couple of kidlet car seats, should he ever find the Mother of My Grandchildren, and still have room for Charley, too. The Subaru has a slightly sporty feel, too, which maybe appeals to a young man.

Neither of us cared much for the 2013 RAV-4. Toyota has really cheapied down the interior, with plastic imitation materials that would make you wonder why anyone would want them even if they were real materials. By the time we got there, I was tired and my patience was short, the result being that I took an instant dislike to the sales-bi*ch who was foisted onto us. M’hijito didn’t seem to respond to her the same way I did, and so I assume my reaction to her was the result of weariness and old-lady crankiness. But she kept babbling on and on and ON reciting, pretty much in a monotone, what was  a very long and very obviously canned spiel. If she had just SHUT THE F**K UP and let us examine the vehicle quietly and ask questions that would have elicited the same pitches when we were ready to listen to them, she would have gotten a lot farther with me.

The Honda feels a little more luxurious — it has a pleasantly appointed interior. With lumbar support and an armrest, the driver’s seat is unbelievably comfortable. Unless I crash this vehicle and total it, I believe the next car will be the last one I’ll ever buy. So I’m willing to pay a little more to get something I think I won’t get tired of.

The spaciousness of the driver’s and front-seat passenger area is comparable to the Sienna’s. Leather seats and the very generous standard set of bells & whistles make it a very, very  nice car. Luxurious, really. The back seats fold down — not completely flat, unfortunately, but good enough for government work. There’s plenty of room for two little pooches or one big dawg back there. Pup should come crate-trained. Cassie also will go in a crate without much complaint. So I’m thinking when I get this new tank, I’ll get one of those soft-fold crates for Cassie and put her in it when she rides in the car — that will be a lot safer for her. And then Pup will simply never have a time when he runs around loose inside a car. The vehicle has a TON of space for gear and purchases. In theory I could go camping IN the damn thing. Just bring a soft mat and a sleeping bag, and voilà! A hard tent!

Funny to readers: 6:30 PM:

So what think you, dear readers? Does anyone own any of these vehicles? If so, how are they doing for you? Has anyone researched them, or does anyone trade in the things?

Each of us is looking for a dependable crossover vehicle with plenty of room for dogs, cargo, and traveling. Any ideas?

Image: 2012 Honda CR-V. IFCAR. Public domain.

Blast from the Grocery Past!

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cross-creekSo this evening searching for television content, any content ( 🙄 ), I come across some sort of ersatz redneck cooking show. They’re going on about down-home Southern cookin’ and this makes me curious to look up deviled crab and buttermilk pie in an old regional cookbook that came down to me from my mother.

Yea verily, I find the original recipes. And they’re singularly uninteresting — dull compared to the recipes the show’s producers had tracked down, heavy, and pedestrian. But what should fall out of the book but an old, yellowed grocery receipt. A long, LONG old yellowed grocery receipt.

Though it’s faded and hard to make out, it has a hundred entries on it! And all those purchases, marked as meat and produce and “groceries” (whatever that is) came to a grand total of $89.85. No single item in this piled-up shopping basket came to more than a few dollars. And no single item is named: just the price next to a code showing the merchandise classification.

Imagine buying 100 grocery items for $90 today! A beef roast would have cost around $3.50; a pound of bacon, a buck or so.

Oddly, the receipt shows sale after sale after sale of 21-cent items.

What on earth?

The thing was dated September 28, 1978. Issued by Madison Pay ’N’ Take It, once the best grocer in town — back in the day when you couldn’t buy a decent chunk of cheese in a supermarket and most Americans thought table wine was called Blue Nun or Boone’s Farm.

In September 1978, my son was less than 18 months old. Possibly all those 21-cent items were bottles of baby food?

Unlikely. I used to make his food: I’d use the blender to purée whatever we ate, if it wasn’t too spicy, plus frozen vegetables and fresh fruits. Might have bought one or two baby foods, but certainly not two dozen bottles of baby food. The stuff was full of all sorts of adulterants and fake flavors. That was why I went to the trouble of mashing up piles of real food.

Ah yes: Not baby food, but tiny one-serving bottles of baby juice.

Fake baby juice.

In 1978, I had fallen for the “we’re sooo NATURAL” advertising campaign of a company called Beechnut. It still manufactures baby foods. At the time, it boasted that it was selling wonderful, healthful, all-“natural,” 100 percent pure juice.

In fact, what it was selling was 100 percent sugar water with a little dye added to make it look like juice. Eventually the company was fined $2 million for this particularly nasty scam.

Not, however, before their “juice” had rotted out my son’s baby teeth. The dentist, having had to drill half a dozen of his little teeth, yelled at me for feeding him sugar. I had no idea what he was talking about — I had been downright obsessive about keeping sugar away from him. To the point where relatives and babysitters thought I was crazy!

To this day, my son hates dentists. To this day, I hate big corporate food producers.

That probably was the first clue I had of how evil some of these companies are, and how shabby the food-like products that fill our grocery store aisles really are.

But in 1978, there we were, still in the Organic Garden of Eden: yet to discover the snake was harvesting the apple tree.

Halcyon days.

Brand-New Whole Foods…Meh?

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Sashimi_for_saleWell, that was disappointing.  This weekend I dropped by the brand-new Whole Foods market that just opened in the old, empty site of a long-defunct Linens ’n’ Things. It’s right next door to the Trader Joe’s where I often shop and just down the street from the new Sprouts. So I thought wow! This is gonna be great.

But…maybe not so much.

To begin with, the place was just mobbed, it being the first Saturday after the new Whole Foods opened. I don’t enjoy crowds, and I don’t like navigating chuckablock jammed parking lots. And I particularly dislike the type of crowd attracted to the joint: in this town, people who are very wealthy (or pretend they are) are so self-absorbed and so rude that you just want to kick the twits. They think they own the road, the parking lot, and everything around them. And as for dumpy little old ladies in blue jeans? They look at you with a sneer on their face if they happen to notice you, which mercifully isn’t often because most of the time they look right through you. They’ll run you down in a parking lot, they’ll run you down with a cart in the store, and they’ll actually push you aside if they get a chance.

This is not an illusion. It’s very noticeable in certain parts of the city and in certain shopping centers. Shoppers at the AJ’s at 67th and Union Hills  behave that way routinely, and you’ll see it at the Whole Foods on Mayo Boulevard in Scottsdale and at Kierland Commons in Scottsdale and at the Scottsdale Quarter…heh!

There’s a reason we call it “Snotsdale.”

Social issues aside, I wasn’t at all impressed with the store, once I got inside the thing.

At the outset, it was instantly clear the building is not large enough for a retail operation with such grandiose pretensions. They’ve crammed so much junk into it, so tightly, that there’s hardly any room to move around. So customers shuffle from department to department in ambling lines, like madding crowds at Disneyland.

Then they’ve filled what space they have with stuff that’s just out-and-out absurd. A juice bar, for example, where you can buy glasses of fresh-squeezed juices for upwards of $6.50. A sit-down eaterie/coffee house at the north entrance that forces you to wind your way through stunned-looking noshers (who, in the time-honored manner of their social class, will not step out of your way but feel it is their privilege to block all and sundry who wish to pass). Giant tubs of locally roasted coffee beans, with a giant roaster display thing taking up an enormous amount of space…but no espresso beans that I could find, BTW.

Most ridiculous, however — IMHO — is that they’ve installed a freaking bar, front and center!

No joke. There’s a bar at the front of the store. It’s billed as a “pub” and serves 87 gerjillion varieties of boutique beers, many on tap. Plus food and champagne and four TV sets tuned to sporting events. For your convenience, unless you’re stocking your weekend cabin at the Pinetop Country Club, you can even pay for a small number of grocery items while you’re hanging out in the bar.

Now, it’s not that I have any objection to a nice, fun bar. Au contraire. As you may have noticed, I tend to enjoy my boozie-poos to a fault. So I’m not throwing asparagus at the patrons of said bar. It’s just that…well, the merry din coming out of a successful bar is less than conducive to deciding whether this avocado is ripe, whether that Hawai’ian mango is a better choice than this Mexican papaya, whether you’d like a pound of ahi or a nice chunk of wild-caught salmon, and whether what’s needed today is a cab or a syrah. It’s not a background that I find very comfortable when I’m trying to shop for groceries.

It was very loud and very annoying.

There was a whole lotta drinkin’ goin’ on there. One Yelper even noted a customer walking around the store with an open beer. This means that driving in the vicinity of 20th Street and Camelback, which was already plenty chaotic, is now going to be downright dangerous at pretty much any time of day or night. Nothing like a responsible corporate citizen, eh?

Deciding never to return to that place was a proverbial no-brainer. Far more disappointing, though, is the realization that I also won’t be shopping at the Trader Joe’s nearest to my house anymore. I am not going to do battle with some rich bitch or effete twit over a parking space for the privilege of buying a few artichokes, no matter how excellent and inexpensive they may be.

Happily, the Trader Joe/Whole Foods combo exists at a much calmer venue at Tatum and Shea, across the street from a mega-yuppified Fry’s on the fringes of Paradise Valley. Both strip malls have parking that’s up to the job, and the design for that Whole Foods is not bat-sh!t inSANE. The store is much larger, which means it can accommodate fun clothing, 1950s-style make-up (which is what non-toxic, cruelty-free lipstick and mascara are: perfectly awful, waxy stuff reminiscent of the Avon products some of us can recall kiping from our mothers’ dressing tables and painting on our young faces), a very fine sushi counter, and all the fancy foods and drinks you crave. With plenty of room to move around without being bowled down by the Entitled set.

The intersection of Tatum and Shea is a far piece from my house. However, by the time I reach Home Depot, I’m halfway there. When I’m on the college campus, it’s on my way home (more or less). And when I was a young thing living in the effete lawyer’s and doctor’s ghetto that was the gentrified Encanto district, I used to drive to Tatum and Shea at least once a week to do my grocery shopping, since there wasn’t a decent supermarket in the Phoenix city limits after Stan Felix’s redoubtable Madison Pay ’N’ Take It closed down. At least not that any of us could find at the time.

So it’s not that big a deal. It’s just…what? déjà vu, in its weird way?

Image: Nigiri sushi for sale at Tokyo supermarket. MichaelMaggs. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.

Shifting the Credit-Card Cycle: An Unexpected Outcome

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You may recall that along about the first of this month, I came up with the wacky-sounding idea of artificially forcing my American Express billing cycle, which runs from the 21st to the 20th, to coincide with my real-life monthly budget cycle, which runs from the 1st to the 31st. To accomplish this, I used savings to pay off the credit-card charges made during the last ten days of August and reset my personal charge-card budget to begin on the 1st of each month and end on the 20th, resolving to use cash to cover discretionary costs for the last ten days of the month.

This would insure that I never buy things with money that’s not already in the bank account. It would allow the same monthly amount for discretionary spending — $1100 — but simply reduce the portion of that amount allocated to put on the charge card. Instead of putting $1100 on the charge card each month, I would put $745 on the card and pay for the remaining grocery and other discretionary bills with $355 in cash. Or less, depending on how much remained in the budget when I got to the last day of the credit-card cycle.

Well, here we are at the 21st. How did the scheme work?

It actually seems to have packed a little surprise.

Wouldn’tcha know it, this month brought two big, unplanned expenses: the pool’s backwash valve handle snapped off — $192 to fix that damn thing — and I bought a new back-saving chair for the TV room, one whose design will force me to sit up straight and not fall asleep in it. The chair cost $600.

I’d figured to pay for the chair out of savings. The two hundred bucks for the pool repair, though, had to come out of the grocery budget, since savings has been raped once too often of late. Yesterday, finding the cupboard running toward bare and the piles of paper on the desk nearly touching the ceiling, I went through all the receipts and bills and entered them in the spreadsheets. Unless I’ve made a mistake (always a possibility), something weird has happened:

When all is said and done, if I can keep purchases over the next nine days down to $180, I should only have to raid about $150 out of savings to pay for everything, including the chair and the pool repair.

There’s enough money in the checking account to cover almost all those expenses, assuming I don’t go berserk in the next week & a half.

How to explain this? Normally outgo matches income each month, right to the penny. But this month, I come up with almost $640 in wriggle room. And yes, that is after projected expenses right up to the 30th.

Could changing the amount budgeted to spend on credit cards make that much difference?

That doesn’t seem to make sense. Thirty days is the same as thirty days, no matter what period the thirty days spans.

I spent about $110 less in Costco this month than over the previous 31-day cycle. Although that doesn’t account for a $640 windfall, it’s an interesting development.

On average, I spend $295 a month at Costco. That covers food, household supplies, personal items, clothing, wine, the annual purchase of chlorine tablets for the pool, and the occasional small appliance. In July/August, I spent $318 there; between August 21 and today, $207.

It occurs to me that shopping at Costco may run up monthly expenses, even though in theory buying in bulk should keep costs down over time. And that’s bizarre: not having to run to the grocery store every time you turn around to buy toilet paper, detergent, and paper towels at inflated prices should save money, not jack up costs.

WTF?

I think the problem may be that Costco is Impulse Buy Central. And it’s that way because of a specific merchandising strategy:

You know that anything you see in that place is likely to be gone the next time you visit. Even things they seem to carry as staples — those wonderful camis, for example, and the incredible Borghese mineral make-up — eventually disappear from the shelves. So if you spot something that you think you’re going to want sometime in the near future, you buy it now, even though you don’t need it now.

You buy things you don’t need immediately because you suspect that in two weeks or so, when you’ll be back, the store will no longer have it.

When you think about that, it’s a brilliant piece of marketing, eh?

Since the start of this budget rejiggering scheme (August 21), I’ve shopped in Costco three times. But between the first and today, I spent only $85 there, hoping to preserve as much cash as possible to cover the last, charge-free ten days of the month. That’s because I’ve restricted purchases to only those things I can’t find anywhere else. Otherwise, I shopped in grocery stores.

Not even Whole Foods has the vast array of impulse-buy temptations presented by Costco. Instead of buying for future needs and grabbing that pair of red Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and snatching the cool little highly portable handy-dandy shop vac, I’ve been buying only what I actually need at any given moment. Even if that costs more than buying staples and household goods in bulk, I spent fewer dollars because when I’m not exposed to things that I don’t really need right now, I don’t buy them.

It still doesn’t account for a $640 windfall — there must have been more money in the account at the end of last month than I realized. However…it’s telling.

I’m thinking that a great deal of money could be saved, month-to-month, simply by staying out of Costco. The store does carry some things I can’t find easily anywhere else, certainly not for the price:

• tomatoes with flavor (those Campari-brand tomatoes actually taste like tomatoes, and they cost a lot less at Costco than cocktail tomatoes at other stores; their flavor is better, too)
• Glorias (jeans that fit grown women)
• chicken and pork for the dog
• dog veggies (frozen vegetable mix with no corn, onions, or artificial flavorings)
• chlorine tablets (vast savings!)
• toilet paper in lifetime supplies
• paper towels in lifetime supplies
• walnuts, pecans, and pine nuts
• cheap wine
• hard liquor in lifetime supplies

Really…that’s not very much stuff.

Maybe buying everything else in smaller quantities at other stores would push monthly costs down, even if the amount paid for certain things (meat and fresh produce, for example) would be higher.

Geez. If I could recover even $200 or $300 a month out of the budget — to say nothing of $640! — my life would be so much better! I could actually DO some things, rather than just getting by from day to day. Imagine being able to afford to go to shows, buy some decent clothes (new, not second-hand!), and go out to a restaurant without feeling guilty. Maybe afford the gas to drive up to Prescott or over to Bisbee now and again.

Imagine that.