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Shopping

Do you do mail-in rebates?

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Grrr! I think I just got jumped through the hoops for very little in return. At Costco I picked up a package of three air-conditioning filters for $39.99; mail in a rebate form (which asks for personal information such as your e-mail address and phone number) and they’ll send you a munificent three bucks, dropping the per-filter price to $12.33.

They’re high-quality filters, the nonallergenic electrostatic variety supposedly good for three months, reinforced well enough that they don’t foop up into the air-conditioning vent and form a giant concave toy whistle every time the AC unit comes on. But still.

In June of 2008, I bought two similar filters from Ace for $31.17, or $15.58 apiece; allowing for 3 percent inflation, today they might be expected to sell for $16.04. In other words, I used my time and my 44-cent stamp to save $11.13. Had I chosen not to kill time, compromise my ethics by lying about my phone number and e-mail address on their form, and use up a postage stamp, my savings over an Ace Hardware purchase still would have been $6.75—without the rebate.

Was it really worth the hassle to send in a rebate for three bucks, which I may or may not ever see?

Do you consider a mail-in rebate offer a strong enough come-on to persuade you to buy a product, or to prefer Product A (with rebate) over Product B (same price, no rebate)? Is there a limit on how small a rebate you’ll bother with?

Delayed Gratification: The frugalist’s secret weapon

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Over the weekend, M’hijito and I dropped by a Cost Plus (World Market) in hopes of finding some stylish and cheap outdoor furniture to decorate the newly refurbished yard. And did we hit the jackpot!

The past few months, we’ve admired various pieces of Late Downscale Designer furnishings there but generally thought they were too expensive. I’ve lusted after some faux teak outdoor tub chairs, very comfortable and kinda nifty-looking, and he has coveted various tile-topped tables and faux teak dining sets.

The tub chairs normally cost $100 apiece. And though they’re very nice, I’m sure, I never felt the quality was worth a hundred bucks. Especially since I already had some perfectly fine second-hand outdoor chairs. Once, feeling flush, I almost succumbed to temptation, but then personfully managed to resist. As for the dining set: the table was over $300 and each chair was $100. Nine hundred bucks plus 8.8 percent tax was outside M’hijito’s price range, and so for him such a purchase didn’t even rise to the level of temptation.

Well. Today when we visited the Camelback store, they were trying to move the last of their seasonal outdoor furniture off the floor. Oddly, in other parts of the country, summer is almost over (for us, outdoor season will return in about a month). So, just when we’re wanting to buy outdoor stuff, it all goes on sale.

And what a sale! Everything was marked down 75 percent!

There wasn’t much left, alas…but fortunately, Cost Plus is a cookie-cutter chain. The manager called around the city and located the pieces we coveted—four tub chairs for moi, two tub chairs for M’hijito, a table, and four side chairs—in Chandler, a quarter-tank of gas from our part of town. By the time the loot was found and claimed, it was too late on Saturday afternoon for us to drive halfway to the Mexican border, so we made the trek the next day, on Sunday.

What an incredible buy! M’hijito got a handsome faux-teak trestle table that seats six people plus six matching chairs for $231! I got four of the chairs I’ve quietly been coveting for the original price of one.

One of the frugalist’s most important strategies is to think twice about buying stuff you think you want. Pick it up, look at it, put it back down, and then take time to think about whether you really need the object of your current dreams. It won’t go away within the next couple of days. Often if you leave the store without it, you’ll find that on reflection you really don’t have such a crying need for it. If, on reflection, you do decide you need it, want it, and can afford it, then you can be confident that you’ve made the right decision.

And, as we see in this sterling example, sometimes when you come back to something you’ve resisted buying, you’ll find it’s on sale. Delay buying seasonal items, especially clothing, holiday gear, and outdoor items, until the designated “season” is almost over, and you often can almost name your price for the stuff.

Heeee! Seventy-five bucks for a sturdy, handsome table that seats six!

Purchases!

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With the advent of more and more good movies and British television shows to watch over the Internet—and the steady loss of good things to watch on my television—I moved a moderately comfortable Eames-style chair out of the TV room into my office. There, I could push my desk chair aside and pull up the Danish lounger to luxuriate in front of some of the wonderful performances to be had by computer. This left a big, gaping hole in the TV room’s decor. So, I decided I should try to purchase an inexpensive chair for that spot. No one ever sits there, so it doesn’t have to be especially comfortable, but it shouldn’t be too ugly. 

I’d spotted a dowdy but more or less acceptable chair at a store that bills itself as an antique mall but really is a collection of second-hand furniture dealers’ booths. I don’t remember what the style is called—I always used to think of it as “ranch furniture,” because you’d see it on ranches and even in the dorm rooms at the University of Arizona: the chair consisted of a wooden frame with wide, flat armrests big enough to set a can of beer on; upholstery was a seat cushion and a back cushion. Although they can be surprisingly comfortable, this one wasn’t, and while the fabric on the cushions was in excellent condition, it was truly hideous and would have to be replaced. 

But I can make cushions and could certainly have built new covers for those. Though the dealer wanted $175 for the chair, I figured I could push it down to around $150.

Still: it wasn’t a very pretty chair, and if I hired an upholsterer to recover the cushions, I could end up paying another hundred bucks or more for the final product.

A notice came in the mail from Crate and Barrel, advertising a 50 percent off sale. Hot dang! On the first day—Thursday, I think  it was—I shot out to Scottsdale like a rocket. Hope springs eternal in the consumer’s breast…

Well, if Crate and Barrel was selling anything at a 50 percent mark-down, I sure didn’t see it. They had one piece marked off 40 percent…the sort of thing that goes on sale for a reason, the reason being no one in their right mind would want to own it. Otherwise, the deepest discount was around 20 percent. The two chairs that would have done the trick in the TV room were well beyond my price range. 

While I was there, though, naturally I had to wander through the houseware department. There I found…ta DAAA! These excruciatingly nifty Polish glass items.

They reminded me of my wonderful Polish sister-in-law, who once gave me a glass sugar and creamer set that looked very much like the one here—a little more modern and stylish but very similar. To my dismay, I broke the creamer a few years ago. I always regretted not getting to know my former sister-in-law better: she and I had much in common other than the brothers we married. She lived on the East Coast and then later in Texas, and the distance made it hard for us to stay in touch. 

So, with this purchase in hand I drove back into town and revisited the junk antique store, planning to buy the wooden chair. Boy, those cushions were ugggg-leeeee! Each was an off-size, too: no chance of buying cushions somewhere else to wriggle out of having to make new ones. And the chair’s joints were loose: it needed to be taken apart and reglued. This thing was beginning to look like a large project, and one that could run up the price considerably.

Pier One has some cool furniture. Most of their chairs are sterling uncomfortable, but comfiness was not a high priority for this decorator item. Besides, it occurred to me that I might get one of their wicker or fake-wicker outdoor chairs, some of which have real panache and actually are more comfortable than their interior furniture. So, before making a final decision about the $175 second-hand masterpiece, it was back across the city to the nearest Pier One outlet.

Their latest sales ploy is to have an employee accost you the instant you walk in the door, eagerly offering to follow you around the store and direct you to the many things you surely will want to buy there. I hate that. So I had to tell the manager, who was the accoster of choice that day, to leave me alone, thank you. 

I found several patio chairs, any one of which would do the job. The one I liked was selling for around $125, but of course you had to pay extra for the seat cushion. The ones they had on the chairs in the store were sterling hideous (have you noticed lamps and upholstery fabrics all seem to be done by graduates of The School for Ugly Design?), and the only cushion I liked didn’t fit the chair.

They did, however, have a couple of wicker indoor chairs that were reasonably priced and very nifty-looking. The jazziest of these was one of the most breathtakingly uncomfortable things you would hope never to sit in. But another, given the right cushions, was pretty tolerable. If guests came over, I could sit in the Pier One chair and let my friends have the better seating. Unlike the seat cushions, Pier One’s throw pillows are to die for! It’s hard to resist coming out of that place with an armful of the things. Soooo….  This was the result:

The wicker looks almost black in this image; it’s actually a dark brown. Overall cost, with the chair and three fancy pillows plus 8.3 percent tax: $334. More than I wanted to spend, but a heckuva lot better than the $1,266 Crate and Barrel wanted for the best of its offerings. I figure I probably would have ended up spending pretty close to fifty bucks on upholstery fabric to rebuild the second-hand chair’s cushions. And regluing the joints…who knows how many hours of my time? Actually, that job might have been beyond my skills, so I would’ve had to hire a handyman to do it: two hours of Greg’s son’s $30/hour time: another sixty bucks.

$175 + $50 + $60 = $285, plus the cost of my time and hassle

So though I didn’t get a bargain, I don’t feel I did that badly, either. Not bad at all. Forty-nine dollars for to save four or five hours of my $60/hour time devoted to repairing and upgrading the junk vintage chair? I’ll take it.

😉

Get those estimates!

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dollarWhenever you need to get work done by a contractor—any contractor—be sure to ask for several estimates. The range of prices you’re offered can be amazing!

Case in point: We need to have three short lengths of gutter installed along the freshly painted eaves of the downtown house. I’d like to get those seamless make-it-onsite things, which don’t cost much and which come in so many colors you can usually get one that closely matches the paint job.

Day before yesterday, I called three outfits that advertised free estimates. Two responded. The first sales rep, who called me back within minutes, showed up that very day and said he’d do the job for $600. The second outfit agreed to send an estimator over at 8:00 yesterday morning. She made the same measurements and pulled out an identical book of color chips…and then presented a bid of $430.

That’s a difference of $170! For the same, exact job with the same, exact product.

Update!

It gets better: The next estimator stalked around the house, measured, cogitated, waved his calculator, and disgorged an estimate of $325…just a little over half the amount the first guy wanted. Amazing!

Next: to find out how much it would cost to buy the materials at Home Depot and get a handyman to hang the stuff from the fasciaboards & rafters. This should be innaresting…

Recreational Shopping: A change of habit

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Spent most of today hanging out with two old friends. All afternoon, we bucketed around stores in the shiny new shopping plazas of the western suburbs. Specifically, we wanted to shop at Pier One and Target. We weren’t after anything specific: we planned just to peruse the stores as an afternoon’s outing. In a word, we were indulging in recreational shopping. Shopping for the fun of shopping.

In times past, an activity like this would lead to the diddling alway of great sums of money. I do enjoy (even covet) much of the stuff at Pier One, and Target is a posted danger zone for me. Today, though, I found myself not wanting to buy much. Matter of fact, you could say I couldn’t bring myself to reach for the AMEX card.

Pier One had some very pretty throw pillows, which I admired greatly. VickyC bought a pair, absolutely gorgeous, soon to look splendid on her sofa: marked down significantly. Also at a good mark-down, Kathy got an attractive desk lamp, which she’s been needing since she kiped her husband’s for her own desk. But you know…my sofa has four perfectly fine pillows on it. Old, maybe; a little stale to my eye, since I’ve been looking at them for several years, but clean and in good repair. A couple of years ago, I would have justified buying new pillows on the grounds that a) I like them;  b) it’s time to update “the look; and therefore c) I need them.

In the year or two since I’ve dedicated myself to a more frugal and simpler lifestyle, something strange has happened. Where before want would morph to need, now something has to be a real need before I feel that I want it. It’s not a deliberate, conscious change. It’s a change of habit that has gone on long enough to become part of my psyche.

At Target, I did buy one thing that to an outside observer might look like an impulse buy: a rope hammock. A couple of years ago, I bought one of those arc-shaped wooden hammock slings from Costco, the trees here at the Funny Farm still being too young to support the beloved old Eddie Bauer hammock that had survived into advanced decrepitude. The Costco hammock is made of sturdy outdoor fabric, allegedly an improvement over rope. It’s not. A fabric hammock collects dust, leaves, bird droppings, seeds, and various other debris. Whenever it rains, a puddle materializes in the low point; tipping the hammock to pour the water out digs a hole in the desert landscape below it. And a fabric hammock just can’t compare to rope in the comfort department: that weather-proof fabric is hot, ungainly, and ungiving. 

For quite some time, I’ve known Pawley’s Island has a hammock that probably will fit in the odd-sized Costco stand. And it’s one of the things I’ve planned to buy before the salary runs out. I’ve just been too lazy to order it online, a process I view, perversely enough, as a bit of a hassle. So when I spotted Target’s version, made of cotton (not a saggy artificial fiber), I grabbed it. If it won’t fit, Target will take it back.

I used my old hammock until it fell apart, something like twelve or fifteen years, both for loafing and for laying out laundered clothes to dry flat. The once barren yard now has plenty of shade, and I know I’ll use a more comfortable, less annoying rope number a lot more than I do the leaf-ridden, dusty, clammy fabric thing. So in this case, I think “want” actually does rise to the level of “need.” I need something to put in that fancy wooden hammock stand, so it won’t go to waste and so I can enjoy laying in the yard when the weather’s balmy. Which around here is most of the time.

The other day on the way home from a client’s place of business, I passed Scottsdale Fashion Square, formerly a regular hang-out. And it struck me that it’s been a good two years since I’ve been in that place. Then I realized I haven’t been in the tony Biltmore fashion plaza for many a moon, either. I simply have dropped the habit of shopping for fun. I no longer bat around stores to pass the time of day.

This, I expect, will be a permanent change. 

Is there anything that’s changed in your habits, either because of the current economy or as a result of a deliberate decision to alter the direction of your life?

The Magic Touch: Gadgetry review

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Don’t believe in witches, do you? Well, consider this: I have an uncanny ability to control manufacturing and retailing decisions. If I like something, be it food, clothing, household items, tools, whatever, the fact of my liking it will instantly cause it to be taken off the market. Truth!

Case in point: broom-vacs. Recognize the yellow number on the right here?

EurekaVacuums

That’s an old Eureka “Boss” Model 169, a handy-dandy little plug-in vacuum that is the single best gadget ever made for vacuuming tile floors, of which I have 1,860 square feet. This device has both a decent vacuum motor and a rotor brush. It’s death on dust and dog hair. It schleps up fur without blowing it into the air, as a regular-sized vacuum cleaner invariably does. Even when the dog dunes are cornered behind the bedroom door, it grabs the hair rather than sending it airborne.

But it’s getting old: far as I can tell, you no longer can buy a filter for it. More to the point, the cleaning ladies broke its handle, so now it’s wired together with bag ties. These periodically break, dropping the machine on my foot.

Wanna buy a new one? Can’t. Eureka sensed that I wanted it, so they got rid of it.

New broom-vacs are all cordless. Know how long a cordless appliance holds a charge? Me neither, but I figure it’s not long enough to de-dust and de-dog hair 1,860 square feet of hard flooring. Nor am I interested in yet another power vampire. A Roomba has to be kept plugged into the charger at all times. Unplug it, and within a couple of days it loses its charge; recharging takes several hours. Convenient!

So, having loved the Eureka Boss out of existence, I went in search of a broom-vac with a cord. No one carries them. Not Target. Not Costco. Not Best Buy. Not Sears. Not Penny’s. Not Fry’s Electronics… But lo! one day I spotted the teal model above at a WalMart. It’s a Eureka, and it plugs in. Price was only $20, so…why not?

Well, lemme tell you why not: you get what you pay for.

This thing, a Eureka 4-in-1, is a bona fide piece of junk. It has no rotor brush, it has all the pick-up power of a light spring breeze, and it makes such a racket it terrorized the dog out of the house. Its cord is so ludicrously short you can’t even vacuum one room without an extension cord; to do two rooms, you have to link together a chain of cords. In theory, it’s a clever invention: with a little dismantling, it doubles as a hand vacuum, and it even has a plastic attachment for the purpose. Trouble is, it doesn’t vacuum worth a darn in either mode.

Moving on…  A couple of days ago, I reconsidered Costco’s offerings. Decided to try a Shark Cordless VX3 Floor Cleaner, since pretty clearly I’m never going to find a decent corded model. This is an interesting little gadget:

dcp_2458

Like the Roomba Dirt Dawg, it’s not a vacuum cleaner. It’s a battery-powered broom. It looks very much like one of those old-fashioned carpet sweepers that women of a certain age can remember from childhood. Back in the Cretaceous, my mother had one of these: it worked pretty well (for the times: certainly no worse than the hated Electrolux!) and it was blessedly quiet.

dcp_2459Flip this thing over and you find a pair of floor brushes, one that rotates around a long axle and one that spins along the right-hand side, supposedly to pick up dirt near the floorboards. Instead of operating by friction, as the old sweepers used to do, the Shark is driven by a rechargeable Ni-Cad battery that allegedly lasts 50 minutes, long enough to sweep the whole house. Dirt is swept—not vacuumed—into a spacious container in the machine’s head.  A release lever on the handle is supposed to flip this container open so you can shake the dirt out into a trash can without having to touch it or breathe in the dust. Cost is about $50, cheaper than most vacuum cleaners.  

After charging the battery the requisite 20 hours (!), I tried it on the floors yesterday. No problem going over every room in the house on one charge—it still seems to have plenty of juice. The “low” setting, intended for hard floors, pulls less power out of the battery but leaves something to be desired. I ran it on “high” for the entire job. 

Overall, it worked pretty well. My only gripe is that because it has no vacuum feature, its brushes must run directly over debris and dog hair to pick up. This means that to clean along a wall, you have to turn it so that its right-hand edge, bearing the little spinning brush, runs flush against the wall or floorboard. This can elicit some interesting contortions from the user. Oh, and the dustbin release doesn’t work: you have to manually open the bin’s flap and fish out the dog hair and dirt with your fingers, a messy and annoying task.

Compared to other power cleaning gadgets, it ran quietly. It picked up the dirt and fur effectively, and its charge lasted amply long. To test the job it did, I attached a microfiber rag to a Swiffer head and ran it over all the floors. This is a step I have to use after any vacuuming, whether with the big Panasonic or a lightweight broom-vac. On inspection, the rag was no dirtier than it would have been after cleaning with the Eureka Boss or the Panasonic.

So, overall: I’d really like another Eureka Boss 169. But failing that, the Shark VX3 is good enough for government work. Avoid the Eureka 4-in-1, though.