w00t! I bought myself a Christmas present:
Ain’t it grand? It’s a three-quart All-Clad stockpot, nabbed from Cookware & More for a mere $151.29 (shipping included).
All-Clad has become my cookware passion, and since learning about Cookware & More from Frugal Scholar, I’ve been slowly replacing old pans with All-Clad, as I could afford them. This online outfit sells seconds, which have tiny visual flaws but nothing serious wrong with them, at very nice mark-downs off the regular retail prices. The store also sells “firsts,” at about the same as you’d pay for the same pan on sale at Williams-Sonoma, especially after you’ve covered the shipping. The total for that pan and the shipping came to about $30 less than Macy’s price.
This one will replace a similar small soup pot, one of my favorites that I use constantly. It’s about 20 years old, I think.
There was a period when I was buying stainless-steel pans from the Broadway to replace my old Le Creuset elephants and rhinos, which had come to feel intolerably heavy and difficult to care for. (Is the Broadway even still in business??? Apparently not… ) The Broadway had its own line of aluminum-core stainless cookware, which was pretty darned good for the time and which occasionally would come on sale at smokin’ deals. I still have a couple of those frying pans.
But when the time came that I needed a small stock pot, lo! The Broadway had quit carrying that line, and nothing they had in stock turned me on. One day, though, I wandered into Macy’s, and what should they be peddling but a little soup pot in exactly the size and shape I coveted. It was copper-cored and a little more expensive than I had in mind, but what the heck. So I grabbed it.
It’s been my favorite pan — the all-around pasta boiling, veggie-blanching, stew-braising, soup-simmering, sauce-concocting, pork-roasting, popcorn-popping pan.
Over the years, it’s had some heavy wear. I’ve dropped and dented it, enameled burnt stuff onto it and seethed the stuff off with boiling baking soda, scoured it, scraped it, and run it through three dishwashers’ lifetimes. It’s developed a hot spot, and now every time I cook anything in it (other than pasta), food scorches on one side of it. That’s getting a little tiresome. Besides. It’s not All-Clad. 😉
It’s not as pretty as the old Macy’s pan, which had a nice minimalist trimness about it. But it is All-Clad. And $151 is exactly the amount I did not spend last month from the discretionary budget…so I can afford it. I think I’m going to like it. And I’m certainly going to like not having to scrub off scorched stuff whenever I use it!
←←Le Creuset
Le Elephant
→→
Long after The Broadway became Macy’s my gram would still call it The Broadway. It was her standard department store =)
Oh, you mentioned Broadway. How I adored that store when I was raising my kids and every nickel counted, and so when I had some extra nickels, I took myself to the Broadway.
When Broadway died, I transferred my love to May Company, then it went away and I was a die hard Robinson’s fan. Loved, loved, loved Robinson’s. Best sales ever.
But they’re all in department store heaven now. And I shuffle disconsolately from Kohl’s to an occasional foray into Stein Mart or Macy’s.
But none of them have my heart.
@ Mrs. PoP and E. Murphy… Ah, yes! How those stores are missed.
And you know, the Broadway was AS NOTHING compared to, say, Bullock’s, the City of Paris in San Francisco (oooohhhhh the Christmas tree in the atrium that soared up past all the mezzanine levels!), the White House, and Buffums.
Anybody remember the Emporium? As department stores went, it was on a par with the Broadway. They were both nice stores…in San Francisco, the Emporium had a store at an apartment development called Stonestown. The building a large, flat roof that opened off the second story. At Christmastime, the Emporium would host one of those traveling amusement fairs that would put up all sorts of rides — a little roller-coaster, a merry-go-round, several things that whirled around and around…it was SO wonderful.
And all those stores had cool little lunch rooms and tea rooms, pretty much targeted at women — few of whom, in those days, had to go to work to help keep the roof over the family’s head. The food was good, the atmosphere weirdly feminine (most men wouldn’t be caught dead in one of the things), by and large they were kid-friendly, and they were marvelously convenient.
Lordie, but this country has lost a lot! Y’know, I’ll bet that if we hadn’t lost those grand department stores that were actually fun to shop in, Internet shopping would have had a lot harder time getting a foothold. Today it’s no longer fun to go shopping — who needs to spend time in yet another look-alike mall full of cloned chain stores, understaffed with bored and inattentive sales clerks? Personally I dislike it so much that my first option is to look on the Internet. Only if I can’t find it online will I go to an analog store.
Ooooh, Buffum’s! That was a lovely store. And Bullock’s was absolutely my favorite store followed closely by Robinson’s. That was in my teenage years when Mom and Dad footed the clothing bill. Then went out on my own and it was May Company and Broadway where I found my deals. Then got married and had kids and it was Mervyns and Target. By the time I could afford nicer quality clothing again I was dismayed that Macy’s is about all there is left and … um … not very high quality there I’m afraid.
@ Deedee: No, I’m not nuts about Macy’s, either. It’s a gigantic sea of clothing, some of which I’m sure is wonderful but how you find the wonderful stuff in amongst all the junk mystifies me.
Bullock’s was great! Once a year they would have this astonishing sale on silk shirts. I learned you could wash them…and I used to LOVE those things. And you could get them at vast markdowns, sometimes 30% of the original price. My uniform in those days was a silk shirt and jeans!
Federated (aka Macy’s) swallowed everything. I refuse to shop at Macy’s. They took over and destroyed my beloved Marshall Field’s. Our family calls Macy’s The Evil Empire. Nice pot you’ve got there.