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“Healthy” Junk Food: We spend MONEY on this?

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Ewwww! One of the door-to-door litterers hung a bag with two minipackages of Quaker cereals on my front gate. I don’t eat processed junk cereals, and so was about to throw them out when I thought…wait! Maybe this is something I could eat between classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

There’s no decent food on campus (decent by my lights, anyway—I don’t eat junk food, and that’s about all that’s sold in the student union, except for a few pathetic attempts at salads). The stretch from 7:00 a.m., when I have breakfast, to 3:30 or 4:00, when I get home, is a long one, and I get awfully hungry. So hungry that the instant I get into the house I fix a big dinner and then overeat. The overeating at mealtime is what keeps the weight on, I suspect.

So, I go to look at the ingredients in the minipackage of Quaker Oatmeal Squares:

whole oat flour, whole wheat flour, brown sugar, sugar, maltodextrin, malted barley extract, molasses, salt, and then a list of the same ingredients that appear in a bottle of multivitamins.

Maltodextrin is a form of sugar. Malted barley extract is a type of sweetener which also contains a form of sugar.

Sooo…what we have in this little box is some ground oats and wheat (very cheap), five doses of sugar(!), and some spray-on vitamins. Oatmeal Squares, sold as “heart-healthy” and so by implication good for you, is largely, if not mostly, sugar.

Yuck! Why do people put stuff like this in their mouth?

Well, the answer is probably that they think it’s good for them (“2 grams of soluble fiber from oatmeal daily in a diet low in saturated fat and cholesteral may reduce the risk of heart disease,” it says here). And they probably think it’s inexpensive food.

What does this stuff cost? At the Safeway, with the Red Card membership discount: about $2.50 for 12 ounces. That’s twenty-one cents an ounce, which at first glance seems pretty cheap. But really. It’s an awful lot for a vitamin pill sprinkled over some heavily sugared grain.

You’d do a whole lot better to buy a box of real, actual oats. Takes about five minutes to cook them, and when you pour the stuff in your bowl, you get the whole three ounces (or more)…not the one ounce that resides in a single serving of Oatmeal Squares. If you like your cereal sugared up, at least you know how much sugar (or honey, or maple syrup) you’re putting over the stuff.

Is there any question why Americans are overweight?

Time to Buy a Big-Ticket Item?

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Yipes! Inflation is about to rear its hideous head, or so we’re told. Manufacturers are threatening to raise prices as much as 15 percent between now and this fall. The reason for yet another kick in the ribs to folks who are unemployed, underemployed, and furloughed is the rising cost of commodities from cotton to copper to foodstuffs.

Well, if that’s the case, now may be the time to buy pricey goods such as appliances, especially if you’ve been putting it off until you can afford it. In another couple of months, you’ll be able to afford it even less. 🙄

My dryer has been dead for so long I’ve lost track—running safely only on “Air Dry” for the past year, anyway. Haven’t replaced it because I quickly learned that I’d just as soon hang the clothes on the line. But before I put away the comforters for the summer, I will need to wash them, and that is the one chore that will require a fully functioning dryer. The comforters need to be batted around inside a warm dryer to fluff them up.

At least…umh…I think they do. Maybe I’ll try it on Air Dry before springing for an $850 dryer.

Meanwhile, though, the washer is also about to give up the ghost. It no longer will spin the water out of a load of laundry. Last night I pulled out a wad of sopping wet jeans. Stuffed them back into the washer and ran the spin cycle again, to exactly zero avail.

Annoying.

Think of it: eight hundred and fifty bucks for a $325 appliance! What a flickin’ outrage. Every time we get another energy-efficient, green “improvement” to our lives, it ends up either costing us through the wazoo or, like the infinitely plungeable toilet, just flat not working. According to that article, we can expect Whirlpool (which makes most Sears appliances) to jack up its prices by 8 to 10 percent, as of April 1. That would be a price increase of 68 to 85 dollars, plus the 9.3 percent tax extortion: $74 to $93 all told…before the delivery charge.

That’s probably enough to justify accelerating the purchase of a washer, rather than waiting until the thing stops dead.

I’m thinking I’ll buy the dryer through Craig’s List, since it looks like I’ll hardly ever use it. But the washer is something I’d like to have for its entire lifetime (especially since they’re now designed to crap out in seven years). So I guess I’ll buy that new.

But it frosts my cookies.

How about you? Will you consider buying a big-ticket item sooner than later, knowing the prices are about to jump significantly?

Coupons for Sale or Rent…

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Did you know you can sell coupons—the kind of stuff that comes in junkmail—at online sites? Saturday’s PlayNooz reported on a New York postal carrier who was arrested for the sale of coupons he’d ripped off from residents’ mailboxes and peddled on eBay. A commenter observed that some coupons, such as the ones that come from Penny’s, are worth ten or fifteen bucks. Or more…one shoe store here routinely sends out 30%-off coupons, and all its stock is in the $100-plus range.

Turns out this enterprise is not very difficult. You simply collect coupons, organize them in some intelligible way (such as by category or by likely frequency of purchase), and advertise your stashes on eBay or Craigslist. You can even consider collecting coupons that are listed online. I have found that you can go here for Amazon coupons and a ton other top retailers. Apparently you can get as much as 50% to 75% of the coupons’ savings.

There’s actually a site that will let you resell coupons from sites like Groupon, Living Social, or Tippr. How exactly you’d make a profit on coupons you have to pay for is unclear, unless you could charge a premium the ones that sell out fast.

What a hoot! Talk about your passive income…just let that junk mail roll in!

Image: Ticket for a free glass of Coca-Cola, ca. 1888; believed to be the first coupon ever. Scanned by uploader from Wired (Nov 2010), Vol. 18, No. 11, p. 104. Public Domain.

Cranky Old Bat vs. Newfangled Junk

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You know you’re getting old when (among other things) you begin to feel that none of the gadgets, doodads, gizmos, and minor amenities that made your life comfortable exist anymore. Or if they do, the darn things don’t work anymore!

Case in point: The potholder.

What is it with those silicone things that the young pups think is so great?

These little frauds are a total mystification. They’re clumsy. They’re ugly. They won’t wrap around a hot pan handle. And contrary to what their admirers say, they don’t protect your hands from heat any better than a real potholder, which is to say, “a potholder made from several layers of heavy terrycloth.”

One consumer effuses, “I absolutely love these potholders!!!!” Exclamation point. Then she goes on to remark, “You need to be aware of the location of the hole in one corner of the potholder. I didn’t pay attention one day and got a nasty burn pulling a very hot pan out of the oven. If you are a bit of a klutz, like me, best to keep 100% aloe in the house just in case you do what I did.”

Uhm…. Doesn’t a hole in the potholder defeat the purpose of a potholder? The whole idea of using a potholder is to keep from getting burnt so you don’t need to have a bottle of aloe vera cluttering up your kitchen counter.

Another burbles, after allowing that they are a bit stiff and difficult to use, “They have a bonus use, as a very good way to get a grip on jars or similar items that are hard to open. (I use mine to unscrew the faucet water filter when it needs to be replaced.)” So…the tradeoff for the aloe on the kitchen counter is a hot pad that doubles as a rubber gripper. Why not just get a rubber gripper for those hard-to-open jars and opt the burned fingers?

Well, we—or more likely, a coalition of manufacturers and marketers—have decided that the silicone things are so wondrous that real potholders are getting very hard to find. The last time I searched in Williams-Sonoma, Bed Bath & Beyond, Sur la Table, and Target, I couldn’t find a real, terrycloth potholder, one that’s terrycloth on both sides, not one with a decorative scene stamped on useless cotton or one with a shiny, fake asbestos backing. All I want is a terrycloth potholder, terrycloth through and through. And I’d kinda like it not to be ugly.

After some traipsing through Amazon, I came across these Gourmet Classics terry Potholders, which look like they might do the trick:

Red is the only color that’s not plug-hideous. They also come in pea-soup green, dungeon black, and apartment-house beige. What recommends them is their size: they’re 8 by 8, the size of a normal potholder.

However, here’s one that purports to be 8½ x 8½. It comes in blue, red, and yellow, and not only that, but it’s a few cents cheaper than the “gourmet” variety.

That Wedgewood blue doesn’t match the blue trim in my kitchen’s Mexican tilework, but what the heck. The things hang inside a cabinet, so no one’s going to see them when they’re put away. Truth to tell, with some exploration you discover that this model comes in many colors, from day-glo red to cobalt via moss green.

If nothing will do for your kitchen but metaphorical greenness, believe it or not they make an “organic” potholder.

We’re told these things are made of cotton “grown without the use of harmful chemicals, pesticides and fertilizers. The methods, materials and dyes used in organic cotton have a low impact on the environment and are certified by Skal International.” The only colors available are earth-tones. In addition to the brit-shindle above, there’s a kind of pinkish terracotta, a leaf green that verges on the minty, and maize yellow. That’s a better selection than any of the other offerings. This potholder, though, is an odd shape: 7¾ x 9 inches. But that might not be a bad thing.

Isn’t it ridiculous that you can no longer buy an ordinary, functional potholder at the corner grocery store or even at the mall kitchen shop? Well. If all else fails, you can make your own:

Do-it-yourself_potholder

What products from the good old days do you miss the most?

Canned Dog Food: Anyone Tried This?

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Has anyone tried Hill’s Science Diet Canine Mature Adult 7+ Savory Chicken Entrée Canned Dog Food? If so, do you know how many cans come in a case?

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!

In the Depths of the Dillard’s Outlet

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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 from American Apparel, which should look awesome under the wild-looking Nygård thing with the fantastic Vera-like flower on the front—all very Finnish and politically incorrect in the worst way. Hope they fit—I haven’t worn Danskins since I was in my 20s, when I favored leotards to go with all those bell-bottoms and broom skirts. 😉

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.