Coffee heat rising

Shopping

Watch out for “sales” that aren’t

by

A local TV station reports that alleged markdowns at a Linens & Things going-out-of-business sale are anything but.

Our Intrepid Reporter took a close look at the price tags and discovered some showed X-ed out prices that were lower than the “sale” price. Other items had layers of price tags, through which an archaeological dig showed prior lower asking prices. An item advertised as 30% off had been marked up more than 40%, so that the “sale” price was more than the former sticker price.

Be careful out there.

Stuff tsunami

by

Spent all of yesterday afternoon at a little party helping a friend go through her deceased mom’s clothing. Some of it. The challenge: decide which pieces, in about ten huge bagsful, should go to the consignment store and which should be yard-saled or sent to Goodwill. Press, fold, and box the consignment-worthy stuff; bag the yard-sale stuff.My friend has already earned enough to take a nice vacation by consigning earlier rafts of the mom’s clothes, and she still has many bags and boxes of stuff left to go. So far, she’s made $1,500 selling clothing through consignment. I’ll bet she’ll tote another $800 worth to the store today.

Mom was a lively gal, very funny and charming. She LOVED clothes, and shopping for clothes was her main source of entertainment. Mother and daughter often shopped together. Most of the stuff they bought wasn’t very expensive—Mom worked at WalMart. But she had a real flair, and quite a lot of it is very cute. She was a sucker for sales, and so much of it was bought at deep discount.

The result was that her apartment was chuckablock full of stuff, stuff, and MORE stuff. The clothing alone, as you can imagine from the prices it’s fetching, was enough to stock a boutique. Then there were the mountains of perfumed bathing supplies, makeup, and various bric-a-brac.

Well, she always looked nice.

As a confirmed cheapskate, this habit amazes me. She was far from wealthy. The only reason she finally got out of a cheap rental in a less-than-ideal part of town and into a little condo was that near the end of her life she inherited a small sum of money. I find myself wondering how much better she could have lived—or even IF she could have lived better—had she bought about a sixth of that amount of clothing over the years and done something else with the money.

I don’t know whether she paid for the stuff in cash or ran a tab on a credit card. Either way: she ended up with money out of pocket and a vast clothing collection in house. Many pockets, we might say, with little or nothing to put in them.

What would have happened if she had put, say, $200 a month in savings instead of into pants, tops, skirts, loungewear, and dresses?

Would it have mattered? She suffered diabetes and failing kidneys. Saving $2,400 a year wouldn’t have extended her life, and it’s hard to imagine that the occasional plump bank statement would have done much to make her life better. If buying clothes made her happy, why not? She supported herself adequately and didn’t depend on anyone else financially.

The only downside, of course, is that the clothing collection poses a huge burden for her two daughters, each of whom has spent uncountable hours trying to deal with a Himalayan range of outfits. Yesterday three women spent five hours sorting through bag after bag after bag of stuff. Even after we kiped the things we wanted, we still filled four big baskets to overflowing for consignment and repacked a half-dozen big black yard bags with yard-sale stuff. And that was only a tiny part of the job my friend faces. On the other hand, going through all the stuff reminded us of her mom, a great old gal who should never be forgotten.

She lives on, in her clothes.
🙂

Is that bargain food safe to eat?

by

You find a gallon of juice at the grocery on megasale. Only problem is, the “sell by” date is the day after tomorrow; the stuff that’s not on sale has a sell-by date sometime in the middle of next week. Will you have to throw out whatever juice you can’t gulp down in a day and a half? Over at Scribbit, a lively discussion of the pros and cons of Costco is going on; blog proprietor Michelle observes that Costco’s milk often has an expiration date so close to the purchase date she ends up throwing sketchy stuff away.

Depends on what the date actually is. Take a close look at it: does it say “sell by,” “use by,” or “expiration”? Or something else?

Food is not slated to spoil by its “sell by” or “use by” date. Truth to tell, if it’s been stored properly it may be OK even after its “expiration” date, though you might not want to give it to infants or folks with serious health problems. According to Consumer Reports, here’s what those dates mean:

Use by, best if used by, or quality assurance: These estimate the period in which a product is at the height of its delectability. After the date given, it may be less flavorful, but it’s still safe to eat.

Sell by or pull: This tells the retailer when the product should be taken off the shelf. But it’s still safe to eat by the “sell by” date. This date figures in the amount of time most people might be expected to store the product at home. According to CR, milk is usable for a good seven days after the sell-by date.

Package or pack date: The date the product was packaged. It has no direct relationship to the date the product is likely to spoil. Comparing package dates of products on the shelf may allow you to buy the most recently processed item, which is nice, but the older one is not necessarily about to spoil.

Expiration date: For food, this is the term that indicates food may be spoiled. CR says an exception is eggs, which can be used three to five weeks after the stamped-on expiration date. Remember, too, that for other products the “expiration date” is often just a marketing gimmick to induce you to buy new packages of perfectly OK products (such as sunscreen) at regular intervals.

The way a food is stored is crucially important to how long it stays edible. And you may not know. For example, last summer I made an emergency run to the nearby Albertson’s to buy some butter. What should I find but that the cooler where the butter and margarine were stored was out of order! It clearly had been out of order for quite some time: the room-temperature butter was soft, and the other dairy products in the case were warm and kept that way under the display case’s lights.

I didn’t buy it, and on the way out (annoyed that now I would have to burn gas to make a six-mile round-trip traipse to buy a single package of butter) I mentioned the broken case and room-temperature dairy products to the store manager. She just shrugged and said a repairman was supposed to show up that day. It was clear she had no intention of removing the products—as soon as the cooler was repaired, shoppers would have no idea the butter, margarine, sour cream, cream cheese and other products had been sitting at 80 degrees for many hours.

So, as in most cases, we’re reduced to having to use common sense. Give any food item the sniff test, no matter when it’s dated. Does it smell fresh? Any whiff of the rancid about it? And do you see any sign of mildew or dried-up spots? Does the can bulge? Is the can dented? If so, out it goes.

Don’t assume the dates on a product necessarily mean you have to consume it by that date, or that it’s still safe by that date, either. When in doubt, throw it out.

Nifty new toy

by

The Barbecues Galore grill I bought a year or so ago experienced its third truly scary fire the other day, the second that was certifiably dangerous.

First time, M’hijito was present. The grill has a drip pan for grease, very nice except it’s about an inch above the propane tank. That caught fire in a big way. I’d managed to turn off the burners and was about to approach it with baking soda in hand when M’hijito pointed out that it was so close to the propane and so hot there was some real chance the tank could explode.

Exit the spectators, stage left.

To everyone’s relief, the fire burned out before it had any spectacular effects. After that I was really careful to be sure the drip pan didn’t collect any grease.

Last week the whole darn thing caught fire. It took three or four cups of baking soda to put out the flames, which, as you can imagine, didn’t do the grill any good. Or the remains of the food, not that any of it would’ve been edible anyway.

At this time of year, Lowe’s and Home Depot are having a frenzy, trying to get rid of their unsold barbecue grills. In Arizona that’s weird, because outdoor cooking season starts about in October and extends through May. But those huge warehouse chains operate on East-Coast time, totally out of sync with local reality.

Also out of sync with The Budget of the Coming Depression. Prices of new propane BBQs range from around $300 to around $700. On sale.

Moving on….

Yesterday I picked up a Weber kettle grill, figuring that with the chimney-style charcoal lighter I already had, I could manage somehow to cook the occasional steak or hamburger over charcoal.

Hilarious! In the first place, a part was missing. But more entertaining: unlike the old, sturdy, solid Weber grills, this thing appeared to have been made by hammering out a few beer cans and bending them into kettle shape. It was so lightweight that when you lifted it by the front handle to move it around on its two wheels, it wanted to tip over backward.

Moving on…

Returned that to Lowe’s. Saw nothing else desirable here. Onward to the Depot.

YES! They had the very smoker/grill thing that M’hijito, the Exceptionally Brilliant Chef, uses to turn out incredible food. How much? $157!

One heck of an improvement over the cost of a gas grill, and you can’t blow up the neighborhood with the thing.

Early this morning I put up Gerardo the Lawn Dude to helping me wrangle the thing into the car and then get it out and into the backyard. Being the macho sort of guy he is, he also saw to it, once he’d put it in place on the slab behind the fireplace chimney, that every bolt and nut was solidly tightened down.

It’s really nothing but a metal barrel with vents, a chimney, and some racks. You have to cure it, much as you’d cure a cast-iron skillet, by painting the entire interior & the grills with vegetable oil and then burning a slow fire inside it for two or three hours. It’s undergoing that process as we scribble. Tomorrow: grilled hamburgers par excellence!

Gerardo. As usual, he wouldn’t take any extra pay. I tried to gift him with a half-dozen Coronas and a fistful of tree-ripened limes. He took one, drank it on the spot, and declined the lime.

This is a cultural problem. How am I going to express some appreciation to this lovely man without offending? I’ll think of something. Maybe food: homebaked brownies? He has a cute little kid and a wife who has hit the 21st century running (she doesn’t cook).

Oh, how he coveted the tractor-style riding lawnmowers. While we were waiting for the HD guy to come along with a large piece of equipment to retrieve the last assembled smoker/BBQ from its shelf near the ceiling, Gerardo tried out every one of the tractor lawnmowers. What could a bright, hard-working young man do with one of those things?

Well, I figure at Christmas maybe I can give him a bonus, either cash or a generous HD gift card. Either one, I expect, would go a long way toward improving Gerardo’s business. Must start saving up.

At any rate, thanks to Gerardo I now have a large, down-home, amazing barbecue and smoker Thing that will do handsomely to cook up some mighty fine vittles. And it didn’t bankrupt me.

Hold the dish detergent, please

by

Here’s a little discovery: liquid laundry detergent works as well as (maybe better than) dish detergent, and it costs less. Possibly it can be made to cost a lot less.

In the past when I’ve burned food on a pan and not wanted to scrub it clean right after dinner, I’ve carted the dirty pan out to the utility sink, squirted a little laundry detergent in it, added water, and left it to soak. The laundry detergent seems to work a lot better than dish detergent to soak off stuck food.

I don’t like perfumes and dyes either in the kitchen or the laundry (but I draw the line at paying extra for so-called “natural” products because of the high scam potential), and so I buy Kirkland’s Ultra liquid laundry detergent and clear Ivory dish detergent. I transfer the Ivory into a vinegar cruet, partly because it gets the advertising off my kitchen counter (which is not Proctor and Gamble’s billboard!) and partly because you only need a tiny fraction of the detergent dispensed from a squirt bottle—a hard-sided container with a dripper top is a lot more economical.

Last week I was running low on dish detergent and on cash. Having made up my mind to stick to as many no-purchase days as possible, I decided that if I ran out, I’d substitute a little laundry detergent. That led me to wonder whether using laundry detergent would be more or less costly, per squirt, than Ivory dish detergent.

Wonder no more! The results from today’s Costco/Safeway run are in.

The Safeway brand of clear, relatively unadulterated laundry detergent is 7.99 cents an ounce; at Safeway, Planet eco-friendly detergent will cost you 19.98 cents an ounce. Kirkland’s clear, relatively unstinky liquid laundry detergent and its “green” variant are both the same: 7.64 cents an ounce.

Ivory was selling for 9.96 cents an ounce at Safeway.

You probably could get Ivory cheaper somewhere else, and if you don’t mind blue, green, or orange dye in your cleaning products, you’d no doubt pay less to wash your dishes.

The difference between the Ivory and the Kirkland detergent is 2.32 cents an ounce, not an inconsiderable amount—especially if you wash all your dishes by hand.

Now, laundry detergent is highly concentrated. If you wanted to use it at the kitchen sink, you could dilute it with water—probably by a fair amount!—and still have an effective dish detergent. And that would represent a real savings.

Costco scores in customer service

by

If I weren’t already sold on Costco, its staff would have won me over yesterday.

Headed home at the end of a workday made interminable by the mind-fuzzing effects of a two-week-long spate of insomnia, I made a run on Costco. I needed several food and household items and, most urgently, gasoline. First I stopped at the Target, where I found some place mats that would do (sort of) as companions for the new dishes. After a nice long stand in line at Target’s check-out, my American Express card wouldn’t work. Swiping it brought up an error message. The cashier tried to swipe it on his machine and then looked stymied. Stunned with exhaustion, I decided I didn’t need those placemats (knew that…why’d I ever think otherwise?) and told the guy to forget it.

Now I stumble into Costco. I’m so tired I literally feel weak in the knees. The prospect of trudging through acres of merchandise to pick out the half-dozen things I need only to arrive at the check-out stand and have them reject my credit card: ugh! It’s more than I can contemplate. So I stop by the customer service desk, where I ask a gentleman named Glenn if it’s possible to tell if the card has a hold on it.

Well, yes, there is. He checks it and discovers no problem. Barely coherent, I explain what happened at Target. He suggests I call the number on the card, printed in submicroscopic characters, and ask. I say I can’t read that number. Now—amazingly!—Glenn directs me to a telephone at the far end of his counter and dials the number for me! After a relatively brief navigation through the robotic punch-a-button maze, I reach a fellow who tells me the is account is in good standing.

So I trudge through the acres, retrieve the goods I need, and show up at the check-out. There, my credit card won’t work. I explain, no doubt altogether incoherently by now, what’s been happening. The cashier calls for a supervisor, and one Ernesto shows up. He punches in the card’s number and some sort of code, and thereby he makes the card work. Hallelujah! He says the magnetic strip has given up the ghost and advises calling AMEX and asking for a replacement.

Imposing some more on Ernesto, I ask if this means I can’t get gas at Costco, adding that I’m almost out and can’t get to work without a refill. He instantly comes up with a solution: pay upfront by purchasing a Costco cash card.

“How much gas do you think you’ll need?” he asks.

“About $50 worth.”

Presto-changeo, he produces a $50 cash card and adds the cost to the food bill.

Wonder of wonders. It worked. Stick the card in the pump and it lets you buy $50 worth of gasoline.

What a relief. I really didn’t want to have to find another gas station on the way home—wasn’t even sure the car had enough gas to get home.

Glenn and Ernesto’s kindness went a long way toward making a trying day tolerable. Not only that, but the discovery about the cash card will make it possible for me to buy Costco’s gas again before the new card gets here. American Express informed me that it will be the 19th before a new card arrives—that’s ten days! If I insist on going to work every day, the tank will need a refill before then. So, another Costco cash card is in my future.