Coffee heat rising

Shopping

Shopping for the Pleistocene Set

by

LOL! Frugal Scholar has a great story today about finding a pair of Not Your Daughter’s Jeans at a thrift store, discovering they fit pretty well, getting a compliment from DH (!!), and so going in search of similar togs. None of which fit at-tall.

Was going to add my most recent shopping tale in a comment to hers, but Blogger won’t let you post a comment unless you have a specific gmail account open, and since I’m busy with the Festival of Frugality, I’m not logging out of that account, into the FaM account, out of the FaM account, and then back into the FoF account just to scribble a few words.

But this is funny enough to share, anyway. Hence:

Yesterday I wandered into a boutique in the thriving strip mall where Leslie’s swimming pool store resides. This shop always has THE cutest clothes in the window. Highly covetable.

Within those air-conditioned climes I found a cute top, gauzy with nifty crewelwork trim. Dig out the tag: $135.

Moving on…

The sales clerk came bouncing up and offered to sell me anything she could. I asked how to tell the sizes, since the sizing wasn’t obvious. She also had to dig around for a tag and finally came up with one on a chic-looking pair of low-slung pants: Large.

“Uhm… Large? That wouldn’t begin to fit around my rear end,” said I. “How do your sizes run?”

“Oh,” quoth she, “they go up to about a size 10.”

“A size 10 is ‘large’?”

“Yes.”

“How are you able to sell many clothes? The average woman in this country wears a size 14. That is not ‘large.’ That’s average.”

“Actually,” she started in—hang onto your hat: this is where it gets good. “Actually, the reason fashion sizes run small these days is that the Japanese are buying so many clothes, and they’re kind of small.”

“I don’t see any Japanese customers around here,” I observed.

“Well, because of the demand in Asia, manufacturers are all making clothes for Chinese and Japanese women.”

“That explains a lot,” I said. “I hardly ever buy clothes any more, because nothing fits. And you know, at size 12 I don’t think I’m fat.” (Objectively true: I’m well within the normal BMI range for a woman my age and height.)

“Oh, no, nooooo, you’re not fat!”

You don’t think so? “Well, the only place I’m buying clothes these days is Costco, because that’s the only place where I can find things that fit. Maybe American women would like to wear cute clothes, too?”

Exit, pursued by a globalized bear.

Isn’t that the most hilarious thing? Literally, there is no Asian community anywhere near that store. The demographics are mostly white followed closely by Latino and a fast-growing African-American community. Last I saw, few of us looked especially underfed. How do retailers that have absolutely no concern for their customers stay in business?

So, the next time you try on umpteen berjillion outfits and can’t fit into one of them, you’ll know:

It’s because the Chinese have the sewing machine!

Image: Singer Sewing Machine. Vincent de Groot. GNU Free Documentation License.

A$k and Ye Shall Re¢eive

by

A small mercy: The air-conditioning guy returned to the downtown house to fix the rattle in the motor he’d installed in the swamp cooler. As you may recall, they clipped us to the tune of $500 for that job, something that frosted my cookies because the guy showed up when neither of us was there (the roommate was in the offing) and they didn’t bother to call and let us know how much it was going to be.

Although a swamp cooler is vastly cheaper to operate than refrigeration, $500 is way, way more than the cooler will save on electric bills this summer. If M’hijito had known how much they intended to charge, he would have told them not to do it.

Then about three days after the work was done, the thing developed a rattle. So I called and bellyached. They said they’d send him back to fix it, free of charge. Last I heard, the thing was working OK.

Sooo… Friday evening along comes a bill in the mail: $85.

Ever notice how announcements that agitate you always arrive on Friday, about an hour after the close of business hours?

In-freaking-furiating! The main reason I’m $94 in the hole right now is that the dentist and the air-conditioning guy joined forces to clean out my checking account last month.

So I called and pointed out that they didn’t leave me with enough cash to pay this bill, and besides, they said they’d get the job done right without charging us for it.

She said, “Just void it!”

Done!

Whenever you have a question about a bill or—let’s be frank—get even a whiff of a possibility that you can work a better deal for yourself, A$K! Merchants do want to keep your business, and they often will try to give you a break if you have a good argument for it.

Frugal Scholar reminded me this morning that everyone has been urging me to take the unfortunate progressive glasses back to Costco and ask for a refund. Since I paid for them last November, I kinda doubt they’re going to do anything for me. But at her urging, I’ve decided to try it.

What can they do? Throw me out of the place? I doubt it.

The worst that will happen is they’ll tell me “no,” and then I’ll wander off to the cooler room and buy the bottle of orange juice I need.

Anybody Know How Well This Vacuum Works?

by

This afternoon I came across a Shark Navigator Never Loses Suction upright vacuum at Costco, where it’s selling for somewhat less than Amazon wants. Customer reviews at Amazon are pretty good.

I really have no business thinking about this thing. Just a couple of months ago I bought a Eureka Boss Smart-Vac Upright HEPA Vacuum Cleaner at Fry’s Electronics. Bad move: whereas the Eureka does not suck (literally!), Fry’s return policy decidedly does. I just hate the Eureka. And I hate taking things back to Fry’s so violently that I’m resigned to keeping the piece of junk, or donating it to Goodwill.

Hate, loathe, and despise it! The Eureka is so heavy I work up a sweat pushing it around the all-tile floors in this house—and that was before I dislocated my shoulder. With the arm out of whack, I couldn’t use it at all. It doesn’t pick up. You have to pass the thing back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and FORTH over small particles of debris before they get lifted from the floor. It has no suction at all around the front and sides, so you have to use the hose and attachment to vacuum along the baseboards. All the baseboards. Every. single. goddamn. baseboard. It’s so wide you can’t get it around the furniture or squeeze it between the toilet and the bathroom cabinetry. And the foot lever is so stiff I have to wear a sturdy pair of clodhoppers to operate it—you can NOT push the foot lever barefooted or in flip-flops. To snap the machine back up into its upright position after vacuuming, I have to roll it up against a wall, brace it firmly, and then shove it into place hard; otherwise I can’t get it to pop it upright to put it away.

Disgusted—and needing to vacuum the floors willy nilly, sore arm or no sore arm—I repaired the broken handle on my good old Panasonic with soft felt fabric and yards of duct tape (the home handyman’s secret weapon!), relegating the new junk to the garage. So now it’s functioning again.

But the Panasonic is really old. Sooner or later it’s going to give up the proverbial ghost. Feeling a little stung after the Eureka débâcle, especially since Consumer Reports puffed the thing, I hesitate to run out and buy another vacuum cleaner. At least not without some real-life reports from people who have actually used it in their homes.

Do you have any experience with the Shark Navigator? If so, do tell…in the comments below, please! 🙂

How a Frugal Find Helped End a Friendship

by
Square-plates

LOL! That decorative arrangement with the black and green square plates shown in my last post reminds me of the episode that probably marked the beginning of the end of a very close friendship.

The woman who dubbed me “Funny about Money” (not knowing I could overhear her speaking into La Maya’s telephone answering machine) had wildly expensive tastes. One day she and I were cruising a wildly upscale shopping center when we came across a tony interior decor store that was going out of business. We each grabbed a bunch of stuff that, at “discounted” prices, still cost a great deal more than it was worth. She was taken by those stone fruits and bought three of them at near full price. I spotted a few that were chipped or unnoticeably cracked and talked the salesman into giving them to me for next to nothing—in fact, one of them, he gave to me for free.

My friend then found two square plates, one black and one green. They bore some “artist’s” signature on the back. Arranging the fake fruit atop the plates created a nice effect, and so she bought the damn things for an astonishing price. As I recall, she paid over 100 bucks apiece. These she took home and arranged atop her dining-room buffet, to handsome effect.

Well, I wanted something to put my fake fruits on, too.

I studied those plates and thought…hmh. They looked mighty familiar.

A day later I betook myself to Cost Plus/World Market, where what should I find—on sale!—but those two square plates you see up there. I got them for under five bucks apiece.

Reader, those two plates are identical to the unholy expensive square plates my friend bought at the upscale design store. The only difference is that mine are not signed on the bottom by someone nobody ever heard of.

Heeee! Was she peeved!

I never told her what I paid for them, but she did know I got them at the low-brow Cost Plus, home of the world’s largest collection of $8 table wines. Our relationship cooled into the frosty zone after that, and within a couple of months she cut me off without explanation. I assume it was because of the $5 plates, which in her mind would have hugely devalued the “art” she imagined she was buying. That, and having embarrassed herself with the “funny about money” remark.

😆

Frugal Shopping at the Estate Sales

by

Yesterday morning La Maya and I made a run on an estate sale in Troon, an upscale high-desert area of north north Scottsdale, where for $500,000 you get a stryofoam-and-stucco tract house nestled among the boulders in Commuter Hell. Houses in foreclosure out there go for upwards of four hundred grand.

It actually was a moving sale, and not a heckuva lot was left by the time the estate-sale organizer was hired—the real estate transaction closed yesterday, and the owner had moved almost everything out. But we found a few tschochkies.

The owner was given to buying crafty and ethnic items at galleries and upscale craft fairs. The sale offered a number of stoneware and art glass items that were kind of interesting. I snared three stoneware canisters, thinking they’d be nice on the kitchen counter, which right now is inhabited by an eclectic collection of various holders. I paid $15 for the three of them:

Stoneware-canisters

Once I got them home, I found the pea-green effect didn’t work at-tall in the kitchen. Casting about for someplace to put them, I realized the color would look just fine in the living room, whose walls are painted an Alexander Julian shade I think of as “swamp green.” I already had the pair of stacked square plates with the stone “fruits” on it. The canisters look like they were made to go with that arrangement. That little blue oval box also came from the moving sale.

It’s a little busier than I like. To pull this off, I got rid of the decorative gadget that has been sitting there for the past four years or so, a glass vase with a spray of twigs sticking out of it:

Glass-vase-and-twigs

The glass vase actually  looked better than the stoneware things. However, I’ve been getting mighty tired of it, and besides, those damn twigs threaten to poke me in the eye every time I sit down on the sofa. I’ve wanted to get rid of it for awhile. The stoneware things may not last there, but I don’t think the glass and twigs will be coming back.

Where Do All the Shoppers Come From?

by

Must be payday, that’s the only explanation.

Out of food and out of about everything else, too, I made a long circuit of the globe by way of refilling the freezer, the fridge, and the pantry.

Started around 10:00 ayem at the Sprouts just down the street. Determined to avoid a run on Safeway, I managed to pick up most of the non-Costco food items: cabbage and celery and ground lamb, and to find the shea butter I went there to track down.

The place was overrun with bluehairs. From the minute I walked in to the minute I walked out, flying phalanxes of elderly women made it their business to park themselves and their shopping carts everywhere I went. If I was already where I needed to be, they’d come up and push me out of their way! Have you ever been in a store where you just could. not. get. AWAY. from some annoying customer? One old gal and her hubby fit that bill today. When I walked in the door, she was parked in the bakery section, smack in the middle of the lane that would allow one to get around said department. She was just standing there: not looking at the merchandise, not doing anything…just standing there. So I find another route around, and the next time I look up, there she is again, with her husband’s cart blocking my way! The two of them homed in on me like heat-seeking missiles! Everywhere I went, there they were…parked smack-dab in the middle of the aisle!

Oh well. Thence, on down the road…

Surfaced at Costco shortly after the store opened. Consumed half the month’s gasoline budget at the tanks and then moved on to the store itself.

What a zoo! It was just jammed. This, in the middle of Friday morning. It must be payday. Or Unemployment Insurance benefit day. Where do all these people come from??? When I hit the parking lot, the coast looked clear—I even got a crip space, a miraculous development, since those are almost always occupied. But during the time I circumnavigated the store, the place filled up.

Which reminds me of another funny Sprouts story: As I’m loading groceries into my car, one of my fellow crips comes along and parks his car smack in the middle of the lane, holding up a line of traffic, and waits for me to move so he can grab my crip space. It’s a 100-degree day, and I know the Costco junket will take a good hour, so I’ve brought along a small cold chest and a bunch of those frozen blue cold brick things to keep the Sprouts produce cool. This requires me to take some time to unpack the bags the check-out lady has tossed together, sort the perishables, and fit them into the cool container. Then I have to pack the rest of the stuff into the plastic bins that keep stuff from flying around the back of my van.

The guy stands there and stands there and stands there. His fellow shoppers stacked up behind him stand there and stand there and stand there. I finally climb into the driver’s seat, change into my distance sunglasses so I can drive without killing or crippling some other motorist, and pull out. He races into the vacant spot. The wacky thing about this is that not twenty feet away was another parking spot that was closer to the door! It wasn’t a crip space, though, so I suppose it didn’t meet his exacting requirements.

LOL! Ain’t human nature grand?

By the time I was ready to leave the Costco, check-out lines were halfway back to the far side of the store. Naturally, I picked the line where the guy who was stocking his sports bar with every spirit in the damn store had parked himself in front. Not only did he have to buy every bottle of booze in the house, he had to send his wife back into the store to pick up something else.

While he gassed on and on and on, I moved to another line, where things didn’t move one whit faster. At least the lady who looked like she was buying only one thing but really was waiting for her companion to show up with a truckload of purchases let me go in front of her. Not that it did much good.

Packed as much frozen and perishable stuff into a cold case as I could. Decided against the run on Target, which is always crowded and often nuts. Moved on to Trader Joe’s.

I swear, I have never seen so many people jammed into one building in my life. Here, it was impossible to get a place to park within walking distance. I gave up and parked in the semi-shade of some trees on the far border of the parking lot. Hiked a quarter-mile to the door. The younger set of greenies shops here, while their parents and grandparents hang out at Sprouts. They have their forebears’ manners: if you’re standing in front of a display trying to find, say, the capers, they weasel in front of you to search for what they want, so you can’t see what’s on the shelves. Two women with children encountered each other and parked their kid-ridden carts side by side, coming and going, in the middle of an aisle, yakking companionably while they blocked the way for all comers. When one lady tried to s-q-u-e-e-e-e-e-e-z-e around them, they just ignored her.

Lines were interminable there, too, but miraculously they opened a new line and I got picked to be first! w00t!

Stopped at a Walgreen’s to pick up couple of the Target things I missed by opting that leg of the junket: rubbing alcohol, doggie tennis balls.

Argha! I spent $214 at Costco and about another $75 at the other stores, consuming almost half this month’s budget in one day. But the freezer and fridge are now stuffed and the car is reloaded with gas. With any luck I won’t have to go out again for another two weeks.

Hope not. I hate shopping!

Hmh. Am I alone in that sentiment?