The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. ―Edmund Burke
Has anyone tried Hill’s Science Diet Canine Mature Adult 7+ Savory Chicken Entrée Canned Dog Food
La Maya and La Bethulia’s aging dachshund has now lost even more of his teeth, so they’re going to be reduced to feeding canned dog food. They’re interested in ordering, since this looks like about the best price on the Web, but it’s unclear how much you get for the price. The can looks like this:
Let us know if you have a clue about the quantity!
I just bought $756 worth of clothes!
Yes. That would be eleven (count’em, 11) shirts.
And I paid $108 for the lot.
Yesterday morning La Maya suggested we explore the Dillard’s outlet store, in the Metrocenter Ghost Mall on I-17 just south of Peoria Avenue in Phoenix. I haven’t visited those precincts in years. The once-vibrant mall, North America’s largest at the time it was built, died a decade ago. A doughty Trader Joe’s hung on until, four or five years ago, it closed as the chain followed the white flight to the city’s overbuilt, overpriced suburbs. The Macy’s closed long ago. The Broadway died. Penney’s fled. A wan Sears store hangs on, for reasons I can’t fathom—no one ever seems to go in there—and a moribund amusement park runs seasonally. Otherwise, the main attraction is a bus station.
Dillard’s has chosen to convert its Ghost Mall store into a bargain basement, there to unload merchandise that wouldn’t move off the racks in its tonier stores.
I don’t ordinarily do well in such establishments. The lighting is dim, the atmosphere dingy, and the clothing jammed indiscriminately onto rack after rack after depressingly endless rack. It’s hard to separate the good stuff (if there is any) from the junk, and I have little patience with sorting through piles of orphaned, cut-rate clothing. Normally, all I can see is the rayon pink, green, and purple polka-dotted number, which seems to come to hand wherever one reaches.
So without La Maya’s urging, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to go there. In fact, I didn’t even know Dillard’s had an outlet store there. She said she’d found a bunch of sweet designer tops to wear on her recent trip to Hawaii. So…why not?
Hee heee! I’m sure glad I went along!
Pawing through the vast offerings of unsold clothing, we came across piles of upscale designer outfits in every size. We staked out a dressing room and, unimpeded by any nosy staff (as in “please…you want it? take it out the door! pay if you feel in the mood”), the two of us must have dragged forty or fifty tops back there.
About 90 percent of them didn’t fit. I’d guess a lot of the Asian-made clothing we find on the racks doesn’t sell because it’s mis-sized. Most were too large; some were too small. Several sleeveless shirts were cut unevenly, so that the arm-holes were different sizes. And these were fancy labels: Jones New York, Eileen Fisher, and the like. Every stitch was made in China or a third-world country.
Try on enough clothes, though, and sooner or later you’ll find something that fits and doesn’t look hideous.
Everything had already been marked down several times, and now the store was offering 50% off the most recent marked price. So a $7.50 shirt cost $3.25! The most I paid was about $18, and that was for an M.S.S.P. shirt whose original retail price was $128.
Wow!
So I came away with 11 tops ranging upwards of $60 apiece in alleged value, for just a little over a hundred bucks.
Two of them are tunic-length affairs. I’ve been coveting a pair of leggings ever since my favorite J. Jill saleslady suggested they’d be good with some of that store’s costumes. So as soon as I got home, I booted up Amazon.com and ordered a pair of ankle-length Danskins in black, to go with the M.S.S.P. top, and a pair of maroon tights
So it was a hugely successful shopping trip! We couldn’t have done any better at a thrift shop. And now I have almost a dozen much-needed, brand-new shirts, most of them far more feminine than the usual mannish stuff I pick up at Costco.
My father always used to say that: “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.” Guess it’s some sort of Texas catchphrase. Well, the local Safeway just made that saying come literally true!
The bargain basement turkey having proved inedible for the human and indigestible for the dog—she barfed up a pile of it all over the office this morning—I went by the store during today’s voyages, by way of picking up some hamburger for her. Figured to have to spend about two and a half bucks a pound, a pretty typical price in that place. But lo! I found some for $1.49, not too bad at all.
On the way to the checkout stand, I stopped at the customer service desk to mention my misfortune with the foul fowl. Really, I didn’t expect them to do anything about it, but just thought they should know one of their products was looking a bit suspect. To my amazement, the manager whipped out a gift card and racked up the price of the defunct turkey on it!
Wow!
It covered almost all of two gigantic packages of hamburger, which was hugely on sale. The red-card discount knocked a $54 bill down to $29, and thanks to the gift card, I walked out of there with enough hamburger to feed Cassie for the next four or five weeks plus a bunch of other junk and paid $10 for the lot.
I felt really pleased: $1.49 for boneless meat is a much better buy than the $1.29 cost of the bone-in turkey. Though I had intended to use the carcass to make stock, even if the bones had been usable, soup made with onion can’t be used to feed the dog (and wouldn’t go far in that direction, anyway), and besides, I’ve got gallons of home-made chicken stock in the freezer.
So there you are: a$k and ye shall re¢eive. I didn’t even a$k for anything!
Thanks, Safeway!
🙂
Image:
Daderot. Columbia Expert, 52-inch, 1882. Public Domain.
Two nice belts…
My belts have worn out or ceased to fit, probably a function of buying cheapies at Target and eating a bit too much good food. Have you noticed—if you’re of the female persuasion—how difficult it’s gotten to find an attractive belt that’s also utilitarian? The department stores are full of various flights of leather, plastic, and chain fancy, none of them designed do much other than make you look like you went on a fugue instead of a shopping trip. They have holes. They have hooks. They have chains. They have rhinestones. They have animal hair. They have dangly charms. They have hinges. But they don’t fit through the belt loops of a normal pair of bluejeans!
The ones that do are plain beyond plain, flat unembellished uninteresting strips of leather with buckles made of base metal. Good for holding up your jeans while you’re shoveling weeds out of the garden, but not something you’d wear to be seen in public.
So, I’ve raised my sights above the Target sale rack:
Yes: Brighton belts. And yeah, I know they cost three times what Target is charging. But my experience with these better-quality belts has been that they last for years, not just months. Either of the ones in the top left image would be perfect for jeans or other casual slacks. I need both a black and a brown belt, and that style, the Denver Diamond, comes in both colors. I think the Dakota Chevron Diamond,
Brighton does carry some dressier women’s belts. Below the cowgirl numbers, for example, Brighton Classics Womens Brown & Silver Belt
I like the hardware on this Brighton Classics Womens Silver & Black Snakeskin Belt, too. But it seems to be available only in 28 inches. They also have it in red, in a size larger.
The Brighton stores in the malls here have a slightly larger selection of women’s belts. Some are way baroque. But a few are very nice, along these lines. If you don’t mind crowds and disconnected salesladies.
Just signed up for a month’s free trial of Amazon’s “Prime” membership program. Why not? A month of free shipping at Christmastime: hard to resist!
Do you think Amazon Prime is worth the annual membership fee of around $80 over the long haul? Hereabouts, sales taxes are now 9.7% and probably rising. With free shipping plus prices that often beat brick-and-mortar retailers, a savings of almost 10% on each purchase is significant.
Or is it? To break even on that $80 purchase, you’d have to buy almost $850 worth of goods every year. How many people have $850 worth of stuff shipped to their house?
Seems to me there are three hidden costs with Amazon Prime:
1. that $850 threshold you’d have to pass to pay for the $80 membership fee;
2. the severe temptation to pounce on every “bargain” that comes along, leading you to buy a lot of junk you don’t need; and
3. the enormous harm done to local merchants by just such massive mega-retailers as Amazon.
For many of us, the third isn’t very operative. The Phoenix area, which has cloned Los Angeles’s sprawl and embraced every soulless scheme of Big Business that ever came down the pike, is hardly what you’d call heavy on local merchants. I buy most of my groceries at Costco and Safeway. The few farmer’s markets feature more craft vendors than produce and meat growers, and they take place at inconvenient times, in inconvenient locales. My clothing comes from Costco or the only two chains that carry outfits that aren’t too ugly on an old lady, and my electronics by and large come from Apple or the roundly hated Fry’s. No one who lives here has many choices: the malls host nothing but chain stores, and local enterprises are few and very far between. Amazon is not about to make me quit shopping at only local merchant I frequent, AJ’s.
But if you lived in a real city or in a small town with character, it could pose a problem.
The second, junkomania…well. That’s another matter.
I want this thing
But for just a dollar eighty-four…who could resist?
On the other hand, after I’ve paid the $1.84 plus $0 shipping, I’ll still have $848.16 to go before the free shipping pays for the membership cost.
Because Amazon plies you with “Today’s Deals” (OMG!! A large Moleskine ruled notebook 
But…do you want to? do you need to?
