A look at Brandless shopping

A week or so ago, I came across an interesting article in Advertising Age about how Millennials shop. Apparently, they're far less brand-loyal than previous generations. They care about the quality of the product, certainly, but not about the name on the label; they'll happily switch from one brand to another to get better quality, or the same quality at a better price.

The article went on to cite Brandless, a new online store that started up just last July, as a retailer that targets this new shopping trend. The goal of the site is to sell high-quality products at low prices by eliminating what the owners call "BrandTax": the advertising costs that get wrapped into the price of most national brands. The owners estimate that BrandTax jacks up the price of the average product by 40 percent, and for beauty products, it can be over 350 percent. So the site is approaching retail from the opposite direction: focusing strictly on the quality of the product, not the brand name. And to emphasize just how much this helps them keep costs down, they've priced every single item on the site at a flat $3. This simplifies shopping on the site and encourages people to try new products, since even if you don't like it, you're only out three bucks.

Since I'm a Gen X-er who shops like a Millennial, this site naturally intrigued me. I always look for the best prices on worthy products—nontoxic, organic, Fair Trade, and so on—and one of the best ways I know to find them is by embracing high-quality store brands at Trader Joe's, Aldi, and now Costco. Would Brandless, I wondered, be a worthwhile addition to my list of places to shop cheap but good?

So I browsed the entire selection of products at Brandless, looking for ones that (1) I would actually use and (2) I couldn't get cheaper somewhere else. Unfortunately, after running through every single product on the site, I came to the conclusion that there weren't any that met these two simple criteria. It wasn't that the Brandless products weren't good; it was just that, on the whole, they weren't any better or cheaper than the ones I'm buying now.

Here are a few examples:

• Organic Peanut Butter. Both creamy and crunchy varieties are available at $3 for 12 ounces, or $4 a pound. However, a one-pound jar at Aldi is only $3.39.
• Coffee. The organic, Fair Trade medium roast is $3 for 6 ounces, or $8 a pound. Unfortunately, like the new PATAR line at IKEA—which has supplanted my beloved MELLANROST—it doesn't come in a decaffeinated variety, so it's not much use to me. (Millennials, I guess, don't drink decaf.) But even if you want the hard stuff, PATAR is a much better value if you can get it, at under $5.50 a pound.
• Organic Raisins. They're $3 for 10 ounces, or $4.80 a pound—much more than the $3 a pound we used to pay at Trader Joe's, and more than twice the $2.37 a pound we're now paying at Costco.
• Organic Sugar. A 24-ounce bag is $3, which is $2.00 a pound. That's not as good as the $1.45 a pound Aldi charges for a 2-pound bag, and nowhere near as good as the 80 cents a pound we just paid for a 10-pound bag at Costco.
• Toilet Paper. The "tree free" TP at Brandless is made from bamboo and sugarcane bagasse, and costs $3 for 6 rolls, or 50 cents a roll. The 100% recycled TP we buy at Trader Joe's costs $5 per dozen, or 41.7 cents a roll. 
• Toothpaste. The toothpaste Brandless sells proudly touts itself as "fluoride free," which is baffling to me, given that fluoride is the one ingredient that actually keeps your teeth healthier. (Even all-natural health guru Andrew Weil says you're definitely better off with a fluoride toothpaste.) So I certainly see no reason to pay 75 cents per ounce for this, instead of 33 cents per ounce for SLS-free, cruelty-free toothpaste from Trader Joe's.

Product after product, the pattern was the same. Dish soap, cotton swabs, coconut oil—all cheaper, and just as good, at the stores where we shop now. Even the few products that were marginally cheaper on Brandless than they are at our local stores—such as the organic beans for a dollar a can, or the organic flaxseeds at $2 a pound—would end up costing us more after shipping. And there were many products on the site that were no use to us at all, such as bagged popcorn (we pop our own), paper napkins and tissues (we use cloth napkins and hankies), organic cotton tampons (I've been using the same set of reusable Glad Rags for close to 20 years), and multi-surface cleaner (we use DIY vinegar-and-water solution).

So is there anyone out there who would benefit from shopping at Brandless? Yes, possibly. One thing Brandless carries is a selection of gluten-free products, such as macaroni and cheese ($1.50 per box), baking mixes, corn-based and quinoa-based snacks, and things you wouldn't normally suspect of containing gluten, like pasta sauce and mayonnaise. So if you're a gluten-intolerant person with a need for this kind of product, Brandless could be a good place to get it—although if you live near an Aldi, I'd recommend checking out their extensive LiveGFree line first. Brandless could also be a good place for people who live in an area without any Aldi or Trader Joe's stores to find organic and natural products at a reasonable price—though it's important to factor in the shipping cost and make sure they're really a better deal than your local store.

For most ecofrugal folks, though, I'd say the most useful thing Brandless can provide is ideas. The site offers a variety of "bundles" that look like they might make useful gifts for the person who's hard to buy for, such as the $24 "beauty basics" bundle for eco-conscious fashionistas (cruelty-free and natural versions of eight products, including hand cream, lip balm, toothpaste, and cotton balls), the $30 "dorm essentials" bundle for college students (various dorm-friendly snacks, herbal tea, a mug, lip balm, mouthwash, and all-purpose cleaner), and the $114 "new home starter kit" for a wedding or housewarming gift (a little of everything, including foodstuffs, cleaning supplies, kitchen tools, and tableware). The thing about these bundles is, you could probably put together your own version more cheaply at a local store, such as TJ's, Aldi, or one of the new Lidl stores that have opened this year from Virginia to South Carolina. So you can check out Brandless for an example of what to put in a gift basket, then assemble it on your own and avoid the shipping fees. Brandless products can also provide ideas for inexpensive stocking stuffers, such as fancy lotion, lip balm, and snacks.

Of course, Brandless is just getting started. If the site is a success, it will no doubt expand its product offerings, and eventually it may even have some bargains to rival those at Aldi and Costco (and IKEA, for home products). So it's worth keeping an eye on the site in the future. But for the present, I think it's more interesting as a concept than as a useful shopping destination.

A disturbing discovery about Fair Trade

Way back in May, while working on my article about organic food for Money Crashers, I noticed that they'd never actually done a piece on the site about Fair Trade. So I added that topic to my list of article ideas, and this month I finally got around to writing the article. In it, I discuss the goals of the Fair Trade movement, the various Fair Trade labels and what they mean, where to find various kinds of Fair Trade products, and how to buy Fair Trade on a budget. You can read about all that here: What Is Fair Trade and What Does It Mean? – Definition, Products & Facts

While working on this piece, I discovered something rather interesting. As I mentioned two years ago, I now buy all my coffee from IKEA because it's UTZ Certified—but I'd always sort of assumed that in doing so, I was making a kind of ecofrugal compromise. UTZ is often described as "Fair Trade light," so I figured its environmental and social standards weren't as stringent as "real" Fair Trade's—but since it's still a lot better than mainstream coffee, I considered it the best overall balance between cost and sustainability.

Well, it turns out I may have had it backwards. While researching Fair Trade standards, I came across a very troubling article in The Guardian, a left-leaning British newspaper. Researchers from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London had spent four whole years investigating plantations in Ethiopia and Uganda, and they made a startling discovery: the workers in the areas dominated by Fair Trade collectives generally made less money and had worse working conditions than those where the main growers were big plantations run by big, evil international corporations. This was true even when they controlled for other factors, like the scale of production.

Furthermore, the researchers found that the community development projects funded by Fair Trade premiums—things like schools and medical clinics—often weren't available to the poorest workers. One cooperative had installed new toilets, but they were only for the use of the co-op's senior managers. Another had built a medical clinic, but the families of the cooperative's former workers couldn't use it without paying a fee. And one used the Fair Trade premiums to improve its schools, not by cutting fees so more students could afford to go there, but by building new housing for the teachers, who were already far wealthier than its workers. As a result, the school fees remain out of most workers' reach.

Still more disturbing was the Fairtrade Foundation's response to the SOAS report. They began by saying they "welcomed" the research and would use it to improve their work—but they followed that up by saying the whole thing was fundamentally flawed and shouldn't be taken seriously. They also claimed that "many independent academic studies" showed their Fair Trade model actually does improve the lives of the poor, so this report, which found otherwise, simply couldn't be right. In other words, rather than expressing their concerns about the report's findings and pledging to root out the problems it exposed, they basically said, "Nuh-uh!"

SOAS itself released a response to the Fairtrade Foundation, pointing out several problems with the accusations it made:

1. The Fairtrade Foundation claims that SOAS "failed to find Fairtrade certified farms for half its research sites...making a balanced comparison between Fairtrade and non-Fairtrade systems impossible." SOAS points out that they did not "fail to find" anything; the whole point of their research was to compare areas dominated by Fairtrade production with areas that weren't. That doesn't "make a balanced comparison impossible"; it's the very thing that makes it possible.
2. Fairtrade says the SOAS comparisons were "distorted," because they looked both at large plantations and at small grower collectives. SOAS explains that, first of all, they controlled for size and still found that Fairtrade has no benefit; and second, what matters to consumers is whether the workers are better off or worse, and they were generally better off on the big farms because they paid more, had better working conditions, and provided more days of work. (As a side note, this mades the decision of Fair Trade USA to split off from Fairtrade International in 2011 so that it could apply its certification to large plantations as well as small collectives—widely lambasted at the time by Fair Trade groups such as Equal Exchange and the Fair World Project—seem not only reasonable, but constructive.)
3. Fairtrade claims that other studies show their model does work. SOAS points out that their own study is "by far the most rigorous study of the impact of Fairtrade on workers to date," and the other studies Fairtrade refers to were mostly their own work. In one case, they looked at three producer organizations and talked to a grand total of four workers—in the presence of their manager. In another study, the researchers refused to go beyond a four-hour drive from Nairobi because they didn't want to spend a night outside the capital. And in a third, which involved "3,750 interviews across six products in just 30 days," the researchers themselves remarked on how little they had managed to learn. And finally, SOAS notes, while Fairtrade claims its studies prove the Fairtrade model improves the lives of workers, most "independent reviews of impact studies" find little to no evidence that it does.

So in short, the most extensive study of Fair Trade (or rather, the Fairtrade International model) finds that it doesn't help workers, and may actually harm them. Under the circumstances, I think my decision to go with UTZ-certified coffee—which, unlike Fairtrade, focuses largely on "better farming methods" to improve yields, and hence raise incomes—may actually be the best possible choice.

Ecofrugal Living podcast #12: Stuff Green People Like

Here's the latest Ecofrugal Living podcast, based on the blog entry for November 14, 2010.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

My frugal Valentine

Valentine's Day is the most problematic of all holidays. If you're single, obviously, it feels like a slap in the face to be surrounded everywhere you go by red hearts and roses and teddy bears, a massive consumer binge in celebration of romantic love that you have no part in. But at least you know how to react to it. You can just grumble at how stupid it all is, and then do your best to dismiss it from your mind. That may mean going out and partying with your single friends, or staying in and vegging in front of the TV, but either way, you get to stay above the V-day fray.

Being part of a couple, however, doesn't necessarily mean that you hate all the rigamarole surrounding Valentine's Day any less. It just means that it's harder for you to ignore it. What do you do if you're happily partnered, but you consider red hearts and roses and teddy bears to be corny, trite, or just plain sickening? If you decide to skip the whole thing, your partner may feel ignored and hurt, but it's almost worse to give a mass-market present that you just grabbed off the shelf; unless your partner actually likes red hearts and roses and teddy bears, giving any of these things makes it seem like you were just trying to meet an obligation, rather than actually looking for a way to please your sweetheart. So, as this XKCD cartoon shows, you end up trying desperately to come up with something clever and original, in order to avoid being either "a consumer tool or an inconsiderate jerk."

This is the main reason that, in the 14 years we've been together—marriage, engagement, and long-distance courtship—Brian and I have never really come up with a satisfying way to celebrate Valentine's Day. Sure, we always go to the special Valentine's Day show at the Minstrel concert series, in which individual Folk Project members take turns doing songs or other pieces about love, but that's more a way of supporting the Folk Project than celebrating each other—and since it's always on a Friday night, it usually doesn't fall on Valentine's Day anyway. Over the years, I've offered Brian various little things for Valentine's Day, from poems to baked goods, but he's never seemed very enthusiastic about any of them, or had any ideas about how to reciprocate. So after yet another uneventful Valentine's Day last year, I finally got fed up and said that this year, I wanted to do something to celebrate.

Being an ecofrugal couple, however, we couldn't very well celebrate with any of the conventional gifts that the stores have been pushing since early January. Roses in February, in addition to being ludicrously expensive, are sure to have been either grown in an extravagantly heated greenhouse or shipped up from the southern hemisphere, either of which requires loads of carbon-emitting fossil fuel; according to Scientific American, the 100 million roses given for Valentine's Day each year in the United States are responsible for over 9,000 metric tons of CO2. The heart-shaped boxes of chocolates lining store shelves, though tasty, are mostly neither organic nor Fair Trade—and, as we learned recently, may well be contaminated with dangerous levels of cadmium or lead. And the priciest Valentine goodie of all, jewelry, comes with a host of environmental problems, from the catastrophic pollution caused by gold mining to the habitat destruction of gemstone mines.

Fortunately for me, I had a good idea for a gift fall more or less into my lap. Brian and I had just finished reading the paperback of Gunmetal Magic, an adventure in the Kate Daniels series by Ilona Andrews, and it seemed to me that there must have been some piece of the storyline that we'd missed at some point. So I checked the website and found not one but two novellas in the series, both of them love stories, and both of them available as Kindle books for only three bucks. (Kindle books aren't included in my current boycott of Amazon.com, because they aren't shipped through Amazon's prison-camp warehouses—though if they don't clean up their act soon, I might decide to cut off this source of revenue to Amazon as well.) So I ordered one of them for him as a gift, which means that an e-mail gets sent to him with a claim code to download the book. Then, to make it more interesting, I set up a little treasure hunt to lead him to his gift. The first clue was waiting for him on the breakfast table in the morning:

Oh, I wonder, wonder who, who wrote the book of love?

That planted the idea of a book, which led him to our bookshelves. Fortunately, he didn't have to hunt through our whole collection to figure out which was was "the book of love," because my little Shakespeare doll was sitting between two bookends holding clue #2:

He's working late 'most every night, he doesn't phone, he doesn't write

This clue directed him to the office, where he eventually figured out that the book he was looking for was his homemade book tablet case. Inside that, he found his third clue:

My baby, she wrote me a letter

That told him to check his e-mail, where he found his Kindle book waiting for him with the message, "Come on baby, light my fire! Happy Valentine's Day!" (I think the main reason I went ahead and bought the book for Kindle rather than trying the Nook app was to have a chance to use that line.) Of course, the whole process of downloading the book turned out to be another puzzle in itself (they really could make it simpler), but we eventually got our book, and I read the whole thing to him over the course of that day. So that was our romantic Valentine's Day activity.

Brian, for his part, got me two small presents. The first was a photo he'd taken a few years back of our cat, who has been sick lately, so a picture of her in good health was a nice memento. He just printed it out on plain paper and put it in a little frame he had tucked away in a box, so the whole gift was repurposed and cost nothing except the ink.

Then, knowing that I wouldn't be interested in traditional, environmentally destructive jewelry, he instead picked up a whimsical little pair of earrings from our local Ten Thousand Villages store. Aren't they cute? The tag calls them "a whimsical tribute to eco-friendly transport around the world," made from recycled materials by artisans in Kenya. And even though they were paid a living wage for their work, the cost to us was still under $10 on account of the store's February jewelry sale. What could be more ecofrugal than that?

And finally, to top off our romantic day, he made me chocolate pudding (with organic cocoa and sugar, of course), and we ate it on the couch while watching Mythbusters. The perfect geek date.

So if I had to give a single tip for avoiding the Valentine dilemma, here's what I'd suggest: pay no attention to what the stores are selling. Instead, think about what your sweetie really enjoys, and choose a present that you know they'll appreciate. Because a $3 gift that really shows how well you know and care about each other is way, way more romantic than a $50 gift that you could have given to anyone. Better yet, make your gift an activity that you can do together, and show your love with quality time instead of cash.

And, for all you singles out there who still think the whole thing is annoying: there's no rule that says you can't treat yourself to something special on the 14th of February, or any other day that strikes your fancy.

Discretionary spending

Just this morning, I read an article in Redbook called "What your spending says about you." (If you're wondering, by the by, how I came to have a subscription to Redbook in the first place, it was a freebie I got for taking some survey or other.) In this article, three successful businesswomen in their 30s share their "discretionary spending" over the course of a week, showing pictures of their purchases and the price of each item. At the bottom of the page, accountant Clare Levison—the author of Frugal Isn't Cheap: Spend Less, Save More, and Live Better—analyzes their expenses and suggests strategies each of them could adopt to save.

What struck me about the article wasn't Levison's money-saving tips, most of which I'd heard before, but the sheer amount of money these women went through in a week. Two of them spent around $220, and the third splashed out with a whopping $492. Their highest spending categories were:

• Clothing. One woman went shopping with a friend from out of town and ended up spending $67 on a new dress, a T-shirt, and a swimsuit for herself, plus another $11 on a onesie for her soon-to-be-born baby. Another, a subscriber to a clothing subscription club called Stitch Fix, received a $185 box of clothing from them (five items, including a pair of jeans, a blouse, and a huge costume-jewelry necklace) and spent an additional $62 on a pair of ankle-strap heels and $40 on frilly underwear. Levison's advice to her was not, for some reason, to give up the clothing subscription; instead she said to promptly return any items she didn't love, and also to use coupons when shopping elsewhere.
• Personal care. The lady with the clothing subscription also subscribes to a similar service called Wantable for "makeup, jewelry, and intimates," which she describes as "so good for the working mom." That may be true if the working mom has lots of cash to spare; the box she got from them contained five cosmetic items costing a total of $36, and she spent another $18 elsewhere. The second subject bought only three items—a pot of foundation and two bottles of what might be shampoo—but they cost a total of $64. The third didn't buy any cosmetics, but she spent $84 on a haircut.
• Food and booze. The editors said their definition of discretionary spending left out "the things on the must-buy list, like gas and milk," but they apparently included food items that they decided should count as luxuries. These included all meals eaten out, all alcoholic beverages, all beverages purchased on the go, and certain grocery items that were deemed luxuries, including fresh fruit for the woman who lived in Juneau and ice cream for the pregnant lady. Even whole foods bought for use in recipes (fresh coconut, fresh herbs, lemons and limes) were dinged as unnecessary purchases. For one woman, a food blogger and cookbook author, luxury foodstuffs accounted for $83 of her $225 total.

Now, admittedly, some of the purchases the editors labeled as "discretionary" were questionable. While wine and desserts may be unnecessary, you can't be a cook without buying ingredients. Cosmetics may be luxuries, but I think most people would consider shampoo a necessity. And I certainly didn't understand why the $20 the Brooklyn dweller put on her MetroCard was labeled as unnecessary spending. (Maybe the idea was that, since she works from home, she doesn't really need to go anywhere.) But even so, these totals seemed awfully high to me. I mean, hundreds of dollars of discretionary purchases in a week? A month I could understand, though I'd still consider it on the high side. But a week? Do most women buy themselves a new outfit and over $50 worth of personal care items every week?

Then I wondered if maybe I was being too judgmental. Maybe my own discretionary spending was actually higher than I realized. So I decided I was going to put my own budget to the same test. I went back over all my purchases for the past week and pulled out all the items that I thought would be considered unnecessary according to the editors' criteria. I counted only my own purchases, not Brian's, since that appeared to be what the women in the article had done. I didn't treat the money I spent on fresh produce as an unnecessary purchase, since I don't live in Alaska and I'm not paying inflated prices for it, but I counted all the foodstuffs that could be considered treats rather than basic nutrition. I also, after some hesitation, included the bottle of body wash I bought, since I could, in theory, bathe with ordinary bar soap instead (though I don't think it would actually save me any money). So here's my week's discretionary spending. All prices include tax, where applicable.

• Bath Basics coconut shower gel (to replace an existing bottle that was nearly empty): $5.34 at Rite Aid. This is actually a 3-in-1 bubble bath, shower gel, and shampoo, but I use it only for bathing, so a quart bottle lasts me several months.
• Five pounds of organic, Fair Trade baking cocoa: $53.27 (including shipping) from Dean's Beans. I've stopped buying my coffee from them since I found a better deal at IKEA, but they're still the cheapest source I've found for Fair Trade cocoa, even with the shipping costs. The new bag actually hasn't arrived yet, so I photographed the old one, which we bought in January and have nearly used up.
• A bottle of diet cream soda: 82 cents (on sale) at Stop & Shop. The limes you see in the picture were actually bought just over a week ago; there was a big bag of them on the reduced-price rack for $1.63, and Brian had the idea that we could use them to make our favorite non-alcoholic cocktail, a Knightsbridge. (Actually, it's only virtually non-alcoholic, because it contains a dash of Angostura bitters, together with cream soda, ice, and the juice of half a lime.) We bought one bottle of cream soda at the same time as the limes, then went back for a second bottle so we could share some with friends.
• Two bags of kosher marshmallows: $4.28 (on sale) at Stop & Shop. As a semi-vegetarian (or "conscientious omnivore," if you prefer), I don't eat regular marshmallows, which are made with gelatin, a slaughterhouse by-product. However, I enjoy making s'mores over the coals from our barbecue grill, so I like to pick up a bag or two of kosher marshmallows (made with fish gelatin) when they happen to go on sale. These were reduced from their regular price of $3.29 a bag to $2.
• One can of whipped cream: $3.19 (on sale) at ShopRite. I go through a lot of this stuff, but as luxuries go, it's not that indulgent: only 15 calories for a 2-tablespoon spritz. We go through about a can a month.

TOTAL: $66.90. This is actually a bit higher than average for me, thanks to that $53 bag of cocoa, but it's still way lower than what any of the women in the Redbook article spent.

So what, in the words of the Redbook article, does my spending say about me? Well, first of all, obviously, it says I'm not a big spender. It also appears to say that my favorite luxury items are foodstuffs, particularly foodstuffs that are Fair Trade and organic. It says that I'm concerned about animal welfare, what with the kosher marshmallows and the cruelty-free body wash. And it says that I'm a pretty avid bargain hunter, since nearly all the luxury items I bought (plus quite a few non-luxury items, not shown in the picture) were on sale or purchased in bulk to save money. In other words, it says that I'm ecofrugal, which is just what you'd expect it to say.

And, if Clare Levison wants to tell me how to trim the fat in my budget, she'd better bring her A game.

Anybody else want to play this game? Just post your list in the comments, or link to a blog entry covering the same topic.

Getting my fix for free

One of my hobbies, which I don't believe I've ever discussed in detail on this blog, is filling out online surveys. I enjoy surveys partly because I'm just a nerd who actually likes taking quizzes and questionnaires, and partly because I appreciate the chance to influence the folks who design products and services. (If even one asinine reality show fails to make it to TV because of my input, it will all be worthwhile.)

But an additional perk is that these surveys bring in a little extra money for me. I belong to several survey panels, including Harris Poll, MySurvey, Opinion Outpost, and Global TestMarket, and I also get some through MyPoints. I receive maybe a dozen survey invitations a day, of which I actually qualify for maybe three or four, and they take anywhere from five minutes to half an hour each (usually around 15 or 20 minutes). In exchange for my input, they award me points that I can cash in for gift cards or PayPal deposits. Last year, I earned about $375 doing this, so it's not much of an income stream, but it's a nice little bonus for doing something I enjoy anyway. And because the money comes to me in the form of gift cards, or goes into my PayPal account rather than my checking account, I can feel free to treat it as "fun money" and spend it on little extra treats, rather than part of our regular household funds that I shouldn't "waste" on anything frivolous. (When you've been in the habit of living frugally as long as I have, you get to a point where you actually have to trick yourself into spending money instead of saving it, rather than the other way around.)

Each survey site offers a different selection of gift cards and other rewards, but one of my favorites is a Starbucks gift card. In fact, the main reason I prefer to get my occasional coffeehouse treats from Starbucks is that I can pay for them with my survey rewards. Given my druthers, I'd prefer Dunkin Donuts to Starbucks—partly because there are two of them within a mile of my house, while the nearest Starbucks is across the river in New Brunswick, and partly because they use Fair Trade beans in all their espresso drinks. But since none of my survey sites offers a Dunkin Donuts gift card as a reward, I've been settling for Starbucks cards instead.

To get some extra mileage out of the deal, I took one of the first gift cards I earned and registered it at My Starbucks Rewards, which gives me a free drink on my birthday and access to occasional coupons and special offers. (There are additional perks when you get to "gold level," but that doesn't happen unless you buy 30 drinks in a year, which I almost never do.) I can still cash in points for additional gift cards, because I can log into my account and transfer the points from the new card to my registered one—but it's a bit of a hassle, and I end up accumulating a pile of depleted cards that can't easily be recycled. So I prefer, when possible, to cash in my survey points for PayPal cash and use that to fund my Starbucks account. That way, I can indulge my once-a-month Starbucks habit without having to spend any "real" money on it.

I was thus quite pleased to discover, on a recent visit to Dunkin Donuts, that they are now offering a rewards program of their own, called DD Perks. Their card works much the same as the Starbucks card—load money onto the card, pay with it in the store—but the rewards pile up much faster. In addition to giving you a free drink on your birthday, it also gives you one when you join and one for every 200 points you earn (the equivalent of spending $40). I figured with one of these, I could use my survey rewards at Dunkin rather than Starbucks, support Fair Trade, and get a couple of free mochas into the bargain.

So after registering my new DD Perks card, I cashed in some survey points to fund it. It took several weeks for my reward request to go through, but yesterday the money finally showed up in my account, and I went to the DD Perks site to add cash to the card...and discovered that they don't take PayPal. Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, Diners Club, even something called JCB that I've never even heard of, but no PayPal.

So here I am with this nice shiny new card and no way to use it. I could just fund it using one of my credit cards, but I'd feel silly spending my own money at Dunkin Donuts when I can continue to go to Starbucks with "free" money. I could check all my survey sites again and see whether they offer a reward option that's a prepaid Visa card, which I could then use to fund the DD Perks card, but that leaves me once again stuck with a bunch of of extraneous slivers of plastic to deal with. Or, I guess, I could just hold onto the card in the hopes that eventually they'll add a PayPal payment option.

I guess that even if I never get to use the card again, I'm not really in a position to complain. I already got a free drink just for signing up, so if I walk away now, I'm ahead of the game. But it does seem a bit silly of Dunkin Donuts to give me something for nothing, and then make it unnecessarily difficult for me to fund the card so they can get some business out of me in return.

My own private Starbucks, summer edition

Last winter, as you may recall, my sister's birthday gift to me was a moka pot—a little miniature percolator that does the job of an espresso machine and takes up a lot less room. I tried it out at the time and found that, with the help of some microwave-steamed milk, it could make lattes and mochas as good as anything Starbucks had to offer. I had to wait for summer, however, to test it out on the frozen-coffee treat that really keeps me coming back to the mermaid: the Frappuccino. Well, summer is here, and I am pleased to report that, after one or two false starts, I've managed to produce a homemade frappe that is, if not quite identical to a Frappuccino, at least a reasonably tasty substitute.

My first attempt at a homemade Frappuccino wasn't a rousing success. I started with this recipe from Squawkfox.com, but I couldn't find the xanthan gum that the blogger said was the "secret ingredient" that keeps the blended brew from separating. Fortunately, the recipe said that a teaspoon of pectin would also do the job, and I was able to find that at the grocery store with canning supplies. However, when I tried it in my moka-Frapp, I found that it imparted a strange, sour taste. Granted, this may have been my fault for disregarding the First Rule of Recipes: the first time you try a new one, follow it exactly. I figured that this recipe was basic enough, and similar enough to things I'd made before, that I could get away with winging it a bit: substituting sweetener for sugar, throwing in a spoonful of chocolate syrup, and just tossing in a generous dash of pectin rather than measuring out an exact teaspoon. So perhaps if I'd been more precise in my measurements, it would have come out fine. Nonetheless, I decided it wasn't worth risking a second attempt, especially since as far as I could tell, the pectin did nothing to keep the drink from separating. (The recipe makes enough for two large glasses, and while the half I drank right away stayed well-blended, the remainder left over in the blender had completely lost its cohesion by the time I came back to it.)

So the next time around, I decided to halve the recipe, so there wouldn't be any leftovers to deal with. This meant that I only needed half a pot of espresso, since my moka pot makes two shots' worth, so I just measured out the contents (which came to about 6 ounces), poured half into the blender, and saved the other half in a jar for future use. Then I added my other ingredients: half a cup of skim milk, two packets of aspartame sweetener, a tablespoon of dark chocolate syrup, and a cup of ice cubes. I blended that on low speed until I couldn't hear the ice cubes rattling around anymore, then kicked it up to the "smoothie" setting to get everything good and frothy.

Here's my homemade moka-Frapp in my new reusable tumbler, picked up on sale so I can take my new frosty treats with me on the go. As you can see, it fills the tumbler nearly to the top, and a rough measurement shows that this means the volume of the drink is roughly a pint—the same size as a Starbucks Grande. However, a Grande-size mocha Frappuccino costs about four dollars and has 400 calories (including 15 grams of fat, and 60 grams of sugar.) My homemade moka-Frapp, by contrast, costs a mere 42 cents: 20 cents for the coffee, 10 for the milk, 8 for the chocolate syrup, and 4 for the sweetener. It weighs in at a dainty 90 calories (40 for the milk and 50 for the chocolate syrup), with no fat and only 15 grams of sugar. Even if I go nuts and pile a couple of tablespoons of whipped cream on top, that only adds 5 cents to the price tag and 20 calories to the calorie count. Oh, and mine is made with Utz-certified Fair Trade coffee, thank you very much.

So does this mean I'll be kicking the coffeehouse habit entirely? Well, probably not. For one thing, the urge for a coffee treat sometimes strikes without warning while I'm away from home, and for another, there's something to be said for the coffeehouse atmosphere. There's just something very relaxing about those simple yet tasteful furnishings, the heady aroma of coffee and exotic syrups, the sound of some trendy new album playing on the stereo, and all those Yuppies and students staring intently at their cell phone screens. But when what I really want is the Frapp and nothing but the Frapp, it's nice to know that I can just whip up my own, take it to the nearest park, pull out a home-printed crossword puzzle, and take less of a toll on both my wallet and my waistline.

My own private Starbucks

Hello, my name is Amy, and I have a coffeehouse habit.

Now, mind you, as Starbucks (and Starbucks clones) junkies go, I'm not as bad as most. I've never been one of those people you'll see in there every single morning, waiting in line for her daily cup o' joe. No, an ordinary cup of coffee is something I can brew up perfectly well at home and be quite satisfied with it—more satisfied than I'd be at Starbucks, in fact, since mine is made with organic, Fair-Trade coffee beans. (Starbucks is pretty good about ethically sourcing its coffee, but it hasn't managed to hit the 100-percent-Fair-Trade mark yet.) And, of course, paying 20 cents rather than two dollars for my morning fix is a nice plus, too, and one that saves me over 400 bucks a year.

No, what lures me into the coffeehouses is the espresso drinks—cafe mocha in particular. I first fell in love with this stuff when a coffee shop opened up right across the street from my first apartment, and since then, in every new home I've lived in, one of the first things I've looked for in the neighborhood is the nearest place that can serve me up a hot cup of chocolate-coffee goodness (or a blended iced one in the summertime). I've tried making my own at home, using one of the many recipes you can find online, but it's never been quite the same. If you don't have an espresso machine, the best you can really do is try to brew double-strength coffee (twice the beans for the same amount of water), and it just doesn't have the same kick. It's not bad, mind you, but it's just coffee with milk and chocolate syrup in it; it doesn't achieve that mystical, alchemical mixture of chocolate and coffee, bitter and sweet, that makes the real thing so addictive.

The problem with my taste for these coffeehouse delights is twofold: one, they're caloric (270 calories for a tall Starbucks mocha), and two, they're expensive. So, over the past several years, I've kept my habit in check by limiting myself to one or two visits per month and paying for them with survey reward points (from MyPoints and other sites of that type). From time to time I've considered the idea of buying an espresso machine so that I could make my own coffeehouse treats at home, but even the cheapest model recommended at ConsumerSearch costs $85, so at my current rate of one mocha a month, it'd take about two years to pay for itself—plus it would take up an unreasonable amount of our limited cabinet space. I've often wondered, though, why it is that you should need such a bulky and expensive electrical appliance to brew espresso. Hasn't the beverage itself been around longer than the electrical appliance has? Shouldn't there be some way of making it without all this rigamarole?

Well, apparently, there is. My sister's birthday gift to me this year was this little moka pot, which brews extra-strong coffee right on the stove burner. As best I can tell, it works more like a miniature percolator than a traditional espresso machine: a little reservoir on the bottom holds water, and the ground coffee goes into a little basket that sits right on top. As it heats on the burner, steam bubbles up through the coffee grounds, carrying the essence of the coffee with it, and then recondenses in the upper chamber. The resulting brew may not be truly identical to coffeehouse espresso, but it's close enough to fool an amateur like me. And when I'm done, the little pot tucks easily into a corner of a cabinet, where it takes up less room than the plain old drip coffeemaker I almost never use anymore.

Now, you might think that to use this homemade brew to make my own lattes and mochas, I'd need a milk frother as well. Well, au contraire, mon frère ou ma soeur: thanks to a little trick I discovered at thekitchn.com, all I need is my microwave and a small jar. You just put a little milk in the jar, shake it vigorously, and microwave it for about 30 seconds, and presto: steamed milk on the bottom with a layer of foam on top. Adding this to my homemade espresso produces a latte that, to my taste buds, is indistinguishable from the real thing. Adding a couple of tablespoons of chocolate syrup to the bottom of the cup first makes a mocha that's, if not identical to Starbucks's, certainly good enough to satisfy my cravings—and with fewer calories, too.

It's much lighter on the wallet, as well. A tall mocha at Starbucks costs about $3; my homemade mocha uses about 20 cents' worth of coffee,  13 cents' worth of milk, and 16 cents' worth of chocolate syrup. (This ingredient, sadly, is not Fair Trade and organic, but we had to make do with what they had at our local grocery store. Perhaps on our next visit to Trader Joe's we'll pick up some of their organic chocolate syrup, which will bump the price up by maybe 10 cents a cup, but also make it a truly eco-friendly treat that still costs less than one-fifth as much as Starbucks's version.) And when summer rolls around, I can see how my little toy does at making a home-brewed version of Frappuccino using this recipe from the Squawfox website. I've tried it using brewed coffee, and the result was reasonably tasty, but not really a Frappuccino. But based on my results with the mocha, I think the little moka pot might be the key ingredient.

Homemade mocha made with my new toy falls into a category of goods that I've lately come to see as one of the most important components of an ecofrugal life: the cheap luxury. Articles about "frugal fatigue," which have become increasingly popular as the recession drags on, usually mention the idea of deliberately making room in your budget for small splurges so that you don't feel deprived. The idea is that if you allow yourself a $4 latte once a week, you won't get so frustrated from months of going without that you just snap and let your credit cards off the leash at the nearest outlet mall. But of course, the bigger that "just for fun" line in your budget is, the more it will slow down your progress toward your goals—so finding cheap luxuries, like a coffeehouse mocha you can enjoy at home, is the best way to fend off feelings of deprivation while keeping your budget on track.

So I've decided to start a new "cheap luxuries" series on the blog. I'm hoping to write at least one new post a month that features a frugal indulgence I've discovered, or discovered a new way to enjoy. Look for them when frugal fatigue starts to get you down—and please feel free to share your own ideas for them in the comments.

Green Gift Roundup 2013

On the third day of Christmas, the Ecofrugal Living blog sent to me...the annual Green Gift roundup, all about the best ecofrugal gifts we gave and received this holiday season. Just like last year's, our selection of gifts this year included plenty of secondhand items, mostly from yard sales. The more successful ones included:

• My birthday gift to Brian, the DVDs of a BBC miniseries from the '90s called Oliver's Travels, which he'd often reminisced about and wished to see again. (It's no longer in print, but I managed to track down a copy on eBay, and we both enjoyed watching them.)
• For my mother-in-law, two mystery novels culled from our collection: one Nero Wolfe and one Inspector Morse.
• For a nine-year-old nephew who's said to read anything he can get his hands on, four years' worth of Cricket magazines saved from my childhood.
• For our seven-year-old niece, a potholder loom just like this one, picked up for a dollar at a yard sale. She put it to work the very day she received it, making slightly lumpy potholders that she and her cousin offered for sale in their "art gallery."
• For a five-year-old who loves all forms of paper crafts, a book called Pop-o-Mania, all about how to create your own pop-up books—which I was shocked to discover just now sells on Amazon for $90 new and $40 used. The copy we bought may not exactly have been in "Like New" condition when we picked it up at a yard sale, but it was still in excellent shape, and for $1, I'm happy to settle for a copy that the author signed and addressed to someone else.
• For our four-year-old nephew, a large assortment of LEGOs, including several Star Wars figurines formerly belonging to Brian. His older brother and cousins all got quite elaborate LEGO sets, so it turned out to be nice for him to have some of his very own.
• For our train-obsessed two-year-old nephew, a huge volume on the history of trains, written for grownups, but with lots of pictures that he appreciated.

Unfortunately, not all our secondhand finds were equally successful. The kaleidoscope-making kit we gave to our other seven-year-old niece turned out to be missing a piece (we checked the contents when we found it at a yard sale, but somehow we overlooked that one). Her papa thinks he can cobble together a replacement, and we've promised to send a new kit if that doesn't work, but it still means that she didn't get to play with her new toy on Christmas Day. Lesson learned: when buying toys or games at yard sales, don't just check the contents to see if it looks like everything is there; actually count the pieces.

Other secondhand gifts met with a lukewarm or ambiguous response. Our nine-year-old niece wasn't immediately enthused about receiving the first six books in the Guardians of Ga'hoole series, but we've been told that her reading habits are a little hard to predict; she may ignore a book for months and then devour it in one sitting, so these might yet turn out to be a hit at some later date. The same goes for the two games we presented to her entire family, Tri-Ominos and Brain Quest (a version that's apparently no longer in print, which children of different ages can play together). Neither of these games (both found on Freecycle) has gotten any play time yet, but they may in time, perhaps at a quieter time there are fewer distractions. As for the nice box set of wooden jigsaw puzzles that we gave to the two-year-old, he certainly enjoyed dumping the pieces out on the floor, but he showed less interest in putting them back together again. Fortunately, his relatives all had fun sorting the pieces back out and assembling them so they could go back in the box.

Other gifts we gave were green but not nearly as frugal. For instance, the gift basket we put together as a Thanskgivukkah present for my cousin and his girlfriend included a pound of Fair Trade espresso beans from our local roaster and coffee shop, OQ Coffee. At $13 a pound, it's not something I'm going to want to drink myself on a regular basis, but it's nice enough to give as a gift. We also gave my eight-month-old niece a gift that was specifically requested by her mommy: cloth diapers from Charlie Banana. They ain't cheap (though we did manage to find a set at Target for a bit less than full price), but my sister swears by them for preventing diaper rash in her highly susceptible offspring, and of course I was happy to give a gift that keeps disposable diapers out of landfills. And, in the same vein, my gift to my parents was a set of compact fluorescent bulbs for their dining room chandelier, the one fixture in their house that's still using incandescent bulbs. My dad complains every summer about how hot they get, but my mom has been unwilling to replace them because she couldn't find any chandelier CFLs without very bulky, ugly-looking ballasts. So we found a set on Amazon.com that looked fairly unobtrusive, mainly because the ballasts didn't appear to have any writing on them the way most CFLs do—and when it turned out that they did have writing on them after all, we simply sanded it off. Dad was enthused about having cooler bulbs to install this coming summer, Mom was impressed with our resourcefulness, and I was pleased to help my folks lower their electricity use.

The gifts we received also included some green items. I don't know whether any of them were acquired secondhand (though I suspect not), but we definitely received a few that will help us conserve resources. Like, for example, this staple-free stapler that we got for Thanksgivukkah. Instead of putting a piece of wire through two pages and folding it over to hold them together, it just punches a tab out of the pages and folds it over to hold them together. Isn't this a brilliant idea? It can only fasten a few sheets (up to four), but most of the time, that's all you really need anyway. And it has the advantage that you can easily separate the pages again if you need to, without having to go look for a tool (or sacrifice a fingernail) to get the staple back out. Plus, it never runs out of staples.

We also got a few energy-saving gifts. My sister-in-law, a reader of this blog, knew about my tendency to get chilly while working at home, so she knitted me (or possibly crocheted—I can't really tell the difference) one of these circle scarves. You can wear it around your neck or pull it up over your head, or, since hers is bigger than the one in the picture, you can double it over and do both. This will help me keep warm without resorting to a space heater. (And on the frugal side, I'm sure she didn't pay anything like $37.50 for the materials.) We also got a set of LED under-cabinet lights for our kitchen from my father-in-law. We already have some of the stick-and-click variety (also a gift from him), but these plug directly into the wall, so we can use them most of the time and save the battery-powered ones for power outages. He also gave us a ludicrously powerful LED flashlight. I couldn't believe it was just a single LED bulb in there, but apparently they come in different brightnesses. It's tremendously versatile: you can set the beam on bright, dim, or flashing (as an emergency signal, I guess) and you can also widen or narrow the pool of light it casts. The LED bulb is actually square, as you can see if you condense the beam down to its smallest size (you definitely don't want to check by looking directly into it while it's lit). So I guess maybe square LEDs are bigger or brighter than the standard little round ones.

A couple of our gifts were sort of ecofrugal through the back door; they're for gardening, which means that they'll help us grow our own local, organic food. We got a nice, heavy-duty trowel and a tremendously impressive tool called the Structron Super Shovel, which has, in the words of Tim the Enchanter, "nasty big pointy teeth" on the end for penetrating clayey and rocky soil. Which is what we got. This came from my brother-in-law, who also gave us our King of Spades shovel, which has proved indispensable for everything from chipping ice to digging out stumps. So if this tool is half as sturdy as the last one, it should stand us in good stead when it comes time to uproot the remaining forsythia bushes on the north side of our yard. There's also a gardening-related "gift" that I bought for myself on our recent trip to Half Price Books: a book called Grocery Gardening, all about "planting, preparing, and preserving fresh food." In addition to general gardening how-tos (most of which I've heard before), it has specific information, advice, and recipes for dozens of different, individual crops, including herbs, veggies, and fruit. I decided I had to buy it when I picked it up in the store and it fell open to a recipe for a sweet rhubarb bread. I don't suppose it's actually any more healthful than rhubarb pie, but it looks like a lot less work.

In addition to the official gifts, we borrowed or swapped several books. My father-in-law, who has a truly impressive collection of fantasy and sci-fi paperbacks, agreed to let us borrow the first four volumes of Jim Butcher's Codex Alera series. (Our local library has volumes five and six, but I hate picking up a series in the middle, so this loan will get us up to speed.) And, on a visit to Brian's friend Jon in Muncie, we offered Jon the P.G. Wodehouse collection we'd just finished, and he returned the favor by giving us a sci-fi novel by Alastair Reynolds. This was an author who wasn't familiar to either of us, and Jon assured us that he really should be, so perhaps this will open up a whole new field of reading pleasures for us. (Sadly, the library doesn't have any, but it can be one more name to keep our eyes out for at book sales.)

Along with the gifts, our Christmas celebrations included a few additional green and frugal activities. We saved most of the wrapping paper from our own presents and scavenged a few big pieces from others, so our stash of usable paper is now well stocked for next year. (Too bad in a way; I was kind of looking forward to trying newspaper wrappings with colorful ribbons. But I think the more traditional wrapping papers may go over better with the kids.) And since our main present-opening extravaganza took place on Christmas Eve (which was when Brian's brother and sister-in-law could be there with his kids), we spent a relaxing Christmas day on such non-energy-intensive activities as reading, playing board games, doing puzzles, drawing pictures, and singing Christmas carols around the piano. (Some, as Brian's sister noted, much better than others.) And today, our last day in town, we're planning a quick jaunt to the local Goodwill store, which offers much better selection and better organization than any of the thrift shops in our area. The first time we went there, I picked up a couple of useful items, so now I make it a point to squeeze in a trip every time we're out here in Indy.

So that was our ecofrugal Christmas. How was yours?

The Ecofrugal Java Jive

Last Christmas, when we went to visit my in-laws, I accompanied them on a trip to Costco and was smitten by the variety of organic and Fair Trade foodstuffs on offer. In particular, their price for Fair Trade decaffeinated coffee—just $13 for a two-pound bag—was enough to have me reconsidering the value of a $55 Costco membership. After all, I reasoned, at a pound of coffee per month, the membership could easily pay for itself in the savings on coffee alone.

That, however, was before I actually tasted the stuff. I still had the remainder of my last 5-pound shipment of Dean's Beans to get through, plus the bag of Caribou Coffee I'd snagged at Target, so it was some months before I actually got around to cracking open the big two-pound bag of Costco beans and grinding some up. And the result was...disappointing. I found the flavor very bitter and heavy, without any of the underlying fragrant sweetness that I associate with good coffee. I know there are some folks who really like their coffee as dark and bitter as possible, but for me, this was just too much.

So I figured it was back to the old drawing board, searching the supermarket racks for sales on anything with a Fair Trade label. Unfortunately, the decaffeinated version of our local supermarket's organic brand, Nature's Promise, was $7 for a 10-ounce bag, which made it pricier than the Dean's Beans. But fortunately, I managed to grab a bag on sale for $6, or just under $10 a pound, and I assumed that was probably the best I could do. However, that bargain paled in comparison to the one I discovered at IKEA when we went there in search of patio furniture last July. In the café just beyond the checkout, I came across 250-gram bags of their various house coffees, which included a decaffeinated medium roast. All of them were Utz Certified, and all were marked down from their already remarkable price of $3.49 a bag—which works out to about $6.35 per pound, less than Costco's price—to an absolutely jaw-dropping $1.99. Naturally, I couldn't pass up a deal like that, but my experience with the Costco coffee had made me cautious. Rather than stock up at this bargain price, I decided to get just one bag at first to make sure that I liked it. Besides, I already had a mostly full bag of the Nature's Promise coffee to get through first, and in the August heat I wasn't drinking coffee at my usual rate anyway. In fact, as it turned out, it wasn't until yesterday that I actually finished off the last of the Nature's Promise coffee and brewed up my first batch of the IKEA stuff.

So how was it? Well, like the Costco coffee, it was definitely on the dark side; in fact, my friend Doug, who got the first cup, remarked, "If that's their medium roast, I'd hate to see their dark one." But while I'm generally no lover of extra-dark coffee, I actually found this one quite likable. It was bitter, but the bitterness wasn't overpowering like the Costco brand's; it let the subtler, aromatic flavors of the coffee come through. Usually I find I can't drink a very dark coffee without sugar, but this one actually tasted fine to me with just milk. It wasn't the best cup of coffee I'd ever had, certainly, but I agreed with Doug's assessment of it as "decent but not extraordinary"—which, as we both noted, is pretty much what we've come to expect from IKEA in general.

So IKEA's Mellanrost decaf turns out to be pretty much everything I could ask for: flavorful, Fair Trade, and a great value even when it isn't on sale. There's just one catch: it's only sold at IKEA, and the nearest IKEA to us is in Elizabeth. We have to take the NJ Turnpike to get there, paying $4.90 in tolls. Thus, if I made a trip there solely to buy coffee, the price of two bags would jump from $6.98 to $11.88, or $10.80 per pound— exactly the same price I've been paying for Dean's Beans.

Fortunately, this isn't an insurmountable obstacle. We usually end up visiting IKEA at least once a year already, so we can just add coffee to the list of items to stock up during these trips, along with jars of lingonberries for Swedish pancakes. We can also make a point of popping into the nearest IKEA when we're on the road; when visiting our friends in the DC area, for example, we'd only have to backtrack one exit along the Beltway. So one way or another, we can stock up on the Mellanrost coffee whenever the opportunity presents itself—and if our stock runs out between trips, we can fill in with a bag or two the Nature's Promise. It should still work out cheaper overall in the long run than buying Dean's Beans five pounds at a time.

Or, what with Hanukkah coming early this year and all, we could just plan to do some of our holiday shopping at IKEA. :-)

2012 green gift roundup

Happy New Year! It's time once again for what appears to have become an annual tradition on this blog: the list of ecofrugal gifts we gave and received this year, and how they were received.

Two of our most ecofrugal presents of 2012 were books. My mother-in-law got a hardbound collection of three novels by Golden Age mystery writer Josephine Tey, which we picked up for a song at our local thrift shop. She must have liked it, since she told us she stayed up past her bedtime reading it. My mom also got a mystery book for Hanukkah—a paperback collection of short stories called The English Country House Murders, which we picked up at last September's yard sales. (Not sure how she liked it, since my guess is that she hasn't had a chance to read it yet.)

A small gift we gave to my father-in-law was a metal canister (another yard sale find) that's a replica of the old Quaker Oats can—complete with the original version of the oatmeal cookie recipe on the back. Brian's family used to make cookies from this recipe all the time, until one day they followed the recipe on the can and discovered that the cookies tasted different. At some point, the recipe had changed. (Fortunately, they were able to go downstairs and dig through the old oatmeal cans being used to store items in the basement and find one that had the original recipe on it.) To make this gift complete, Brian made a batch of the cookies and filled up the canister with them. I assume his dad liked them, since his reaction upon tasting one was to say, "Nope, these aren't good—you all shouldn't eat any of them." :-)

One present that we were a little concerned about was the set of old-fashioned letter blocks (also from a yard sale) that we gave to our three-year-old nephew. He had already opened several presents, some of them quite fancy, by the time he got to ours, and we were both thinking, "Uh oh, is this gift too babyish for him?" But as soon as he opened the container, he shouted, "Blocks!" and started picking them up and happily identifying the letters and objects on them. I guess good toys are timeless. (As Brian pointed out, he'd quite enjoyed playing with the blocks at home himself, and he's only 42.)

We also gave one gift that was for all the Midwest nieces and nephews to share: a marble run toy, similar to this one but even more elaborate, with loops and ramps that drop the ball from level to level. We got this on Freecycle and figured it would be just an "extra" present that we'd show to the kids after the gift-giving was done, rather than putting it under the tree. Turns out all the kids, aged three to eight, enjoyed playing with it—as did the teenaged German student who was staying with my sister-in-law's family. So this was definitely a successful gift for all concerned (including us, since the kids played with it in relative quiet for an hour or so).

Some of our ecofrugal gifts were little stocking stuffers. My mother-in-law's stocking included a paper bead necklace (kind of like this one), which counts as doubly green because it's both recycled and Fair Trade. She was sporting it at an open house she hosted  the following Friday, so again, it looks like that gift was a success. We also gave each couple a folding tote bag from IKEA, which is a really handy item to have if you're trying to reduce your use of disposable shopping bags. It's easy to keep some cloth bags on hand for shopping trips, but it's also easy to leave them behind when you're out on foot or making a quick, unplanned stop for just one or two items. The folding totes can live permanently in a purse or coat pocket, so you're never caught short without a bag.

My sister's Hanukkah wish list included two body-care items: raspberry truffle lip gloss from Origins and Sabon vanilla coconut body scrub. The lip gloss, though organic and cruelty-free, doesn't really qualify as an ecofrugal gift, since at $15 a tube, it's definitely a splurge item. However, shortly after she sent me her gift list, I spotted a recipe for a "vanilla apricot sugar scrub" in the Green American's holiday issue, and it said that it would also work with a different carrier oil—such as coconut—in place of the apricot kernel oil. At first I thought this recipe was going to prove too pricey, since all the coconut oil sold at the Whole Earth Center turned out to be really expensive. However, on a trip to Trader Joe's, we found a 16-ounce jar of organic virgin coconut oil (the unrefined kind, with a really strong coconut fragrance) for only $5.99. So the total cost of my homemade, 100 percent organic body scrub was only a couple of bucks. My sister's reaction when she took off the lid for a sniff was, "Whoa!" (I told her that if it didn't work well as a cleanser, she could always throw in some eggs, flour, and baking powder and it should make a pretty good cake.)

My gift to my aunt and uncle in Florida was a window box garden from Earth Easy. I discovered this item when it was featured in a giveaway on the UrbanSherp website, and I thought it looked like the perfect gift for apartment dwellers who like to garden. Although it wasn't an extra-special bargain, I think it deserves to be counted as an ecofrugal gift because it helps the recipient lead a more sustainable life by growing food at home. (Also, with its organic seeds, recycled steel planter, and bamboo lid, its eco-credentials are impeccable.) This was one of the most successful gifts we gave: my aunt said she "absolutely loved" it and had been looking for ways to grow more food in their condo. Score!

Two of the gifts Brian received were inspired by our recent experience in Superstorm Sandy. Compared to many others in New Jersey, we got off pretty easy, with a power outage of less than two full days—but the experience got us thinking about ways to be better prepared for future storms, which we can probably expect to hit harder as the earth gets warmer. So I gave him a battery-powered lantern, which can run for many hours (days, on the lowest setting) on a single set of batteries thanks to its super-efficient LED bulbs. His folks got him a little radio that can be recharged with either a hand crank or a built-in solar panel (though the manual admits that it takes a really long time). Decked out in a butch camouflage pattern, it picks up all the weather stations and can double as a flashlight and a cell phone charger. And I must admit, while I've never considered myself the survivalist type, knowing that we can go off the grid indefinitely and not lose contact with the outside world feels very liberating.

You've already heard about my fabulous secondhand sweater and my electric blanket throw, but I also received a couple of other ecofrugal goodies from Brian: two volumes of cryptic crosswords, my favorite electricity-free diversion. These kept me busy through the quiet parts of our family vacation (when all the kids had gone off to their other grandparents' houses for a second round of Christmas), and I still have lots left to enjoy in the new year.

Lastly, one of our Hanukkah presents from my mom was this little wall plaque, which—though it may not be exactly ecofrugal in itself—definitely celebrates the ecofrugal way of life.

And that's it for our 2012 green gift roundup. Stay tuned for coverage of the first really big ecofrugal holiday of the year, Thrift Week, coming up in just a couple of weeks. (Hmm, I guess I'd better decide what I'm writing about this year....)

Price Check: Costco revelation

Back in 2006, I wrote an article about my experience checking out BJ's Wholesale Club, a local warehouse club. I went in with a free one-day pass and my price book and checked the prices on a lot of staple items (toilet paper, tuna, onions, etc.) to see how they compared to the deals we were getting at local supermarkets. My conclusion was that for the way we shop, BJ's just didn't offer much in the way of savings—certainly not enough to justify the $45 membership fee (which has since gone up to $50). So I just decided that for us, a warehouse club membership wasn't a good value.

Since then, we've gone back to BJ's a few more times, using either a one-day pass or a one-month trial membership, and I've seen nothing to make me revise this opinion of this particular store. However, until today, I didn't have much opportunity to check out Costco, another warehouse store, which has built a reputation around being the anti-Wal-Mart. Unlike BJ's, Costco doesn't offer trial memberships or day passes; it won't even allow a non-member to buy a gift card for a friend who has a membership, as I discovered when I tried to buy one for my sister a few years back. This experience soured me a bit on the store, so I decided, in fox-and-grapes fashion, that it probably wasn't worth bothering to check out their membership costs. After all, I figured, if BJ's wasn't a good deal, why would Costco be any better?

Well, it appears I was a bit too hasty. Today I made a trip out to Costco with my in-laws, and I must admit, it was a revelation. The main difference between Costco and BJ's was that Costco, with its focus on the high-end market, sells a lot more organic and Fair Trade products. This includes coffee, which I've been having a lot of trouble finding at local stores. Until recently, I was buying it five pounds at a time over the Internet from Dean's Beans, a Massachusetts-based dealer in Fair Trade coffee (and cocoa and sugar). But when the price on their decaffeinated beans went up to $45—which works out to about $11 a pound with shipping—I thought maybe I could do better buying it at the store. The problem is, while both my local supermarket and Trader Joe's carry some coffees that are Fair Trade certified and some that are decaffeinated, I couldn't find any that were both. I managed to pick up a bag of Caribou Coffee on sale at Target for about $8 a pound, but the regular price was higher than the cost of Dean's Beans, and the Rainforest Alliance certification it carries isn't as stringent as Transfair's. At this point, I was more or less resigned to paying $12 a pound from now on for the Equal Exchange coffee my local Ten Thousand Villages store carries. So you can imagine how my eyes popped when I walked along Costco's coffee aisle today and found a two-pound bag of their house brand coffee—whole bean, decaffeinated, and Fair Trade certified—for only $13. That's less per pound than a lot of the conventional brands at my supermarket.

Nor did the surprises stop there. Hard on the heels of this discovery, I found a five-pound sack of organic sugar for only $1 a pound. Up until now, the best price I'd ever seen was $1.40 a pound at Trader Joe's—and that's since gone up to $1.60 a pound. And I also spotted a couple of other nifty items at lower-than-average prices, like smoked salmon at $12 a pound rather than the $25 a pound I usually see at the supermarket. (Granted, this is more of a rare splurge than a staple item, but at $12 a pound, we might be able to go for it twice a year instead of once.)

So, there are at least a couple of staple items, like coffee and sugar, that are significantly cheaper at Costco. But would the savings on these items be enough to cover the $55 annual membership fee? Let's crunch the numbers: I probably go through about a pound of coffee per month, so 12 pounds per year would cost $78 per year, as opposed to $144 for the Equal Exchange coffee. That's a $66 savings right there, which would pay for the $55 membership fee with $11 to spare. Our sugar usage is harder to calculate, since it varies widely from month to month depending on how much baking we do, but if you estimate it at about a pound a month, that's an additional savings of $7.20 a year. That would put us at $18.20 to the good. So we would at least come out ahead, if not by a huge amount.

But here's the rub: in order to stay ahead, we would have to avoid the dreaded Costco Effect. Because Costco is huge and sells absolutely everything, you can't make your way through the vast warehouse without being bombarded by temptation on every side. Remember that $12 a pound smoked salmon I mentioned before? Throwing a pound of that in the cart would more than offset the $11 we'd be saving on a bag of coffee. And salmon is just the tip of Costco's retail iceberg, which includes everything from pharmaceuticals to furnishings. Compounding the problem, our nearest Costco is a bit off our regular shopping route—so it would hardly seem worth the trouble to go all the way out there just for a bag of coffee or sugar. We'd almost feel obligated to load up the cart with goodies in order to justify the trip. (Granted, they'd be relatively inexpensive goodies compared to what they cost elsewhere—but given that we wouldn't buy them elsewhere, that doesn't qualify as a savings.) Or, worse yet, we might decide it wasn't worth making the trip out to Costco at all if all we needed was coffee—and then our $55 membership would never even get a chance to pay for itself.

So now I'm faced with a dilemma. On the one hand, I'm not convinced that buying a Costco membership would actually leave us with more money in our pockets at the end of the year. But on the other hand, now that I've seen Fair-Trade decaf on sale for $6.50 a pound, I'm just not sure I can bring myself to pay $13 for it locally. So it seems I may be forced to either (a) give up coffee, (b) stock up on it every time we visit my in-laws, or (c) find more friends with Costco memberships who are willing to sneak us in with them.

Simplifying isn't that simple

[cue music] It's the most ludicrous time of the year....

A friend of mine, in an invitation to his mid-December game party, did a pretty good job of summing up the frenzy that marks the "holiday season" for most Americans:

It is Christmas shopping season.  The shoppers are at the mall in droves, screaming their car horns at the pedestrians to make them hurry and free up a parking space.  The housewives are clobbering each other in fights over this year's incarnation of the Beanie Baby.  People are yelling at each other for wishing them a "Happy Holiday" instead of a "Merry Christmas" (or vice versa).  People are putting up enormous Santa balloons in their yards, bigger than my house, and somehow believing they look cute.  What could possibly be more insane than the way people behave at this time of year?

Of course, there are, as always, those who oppose the relentless commercialism of the holiday. Some of these are religious Christians trying to refocus the holiday on its spiritual meaning; others are environmentalists who want to reduce the waste associated with the holiday; and still others are cash-strapped folks looking for ways to have something left in their wallets when the New Year rolls around. The most recent "InBalance" newsletter from the Center for the New American Dream contained the group's annual exhortation from to "Simplify the Holidays," with a list of 15 ideas for cutting back on the number and cost of gifts, reducing paper waste, and finding more meaningful ways to celebrate. And last week's mail brought a copy of the Green American featuring the headline "Go Green for the Holidays," with articles on:

• how to throw a Fair Trade house party. This is like a Tupperware party, only with handwoven baskets, jewelry, woolens and other items that are perfect for the holidays because no one actually needs them.
• how to "green" holiday traditions like the Yule log (get a clean-burning Duraflame or Java-Log instead) and gift wrapping (choose reusable bags, fabric scraps, or newspaper comics).
• whether a live or a synthetic tree is more eco-friendly. (Spoiler: decorating an outdoor tree or a live, potted tree is better than either.)
• 6 "really terrible" gift ideas, including PVC plastic toys and anything wrapped in that incredibly annoying clamshell plastic that's all but impossible to get open and, once open, goes straight into the trash.
• green gifts and traditions, like giving secondhand gifts, giving gifts of homemade food or body-care products, or "giving the gift of time" by extending invitations to friends and family.

In principle, I agree with all of these ideas. But when I think about putting them into practice, I always come up against some kind of roadblock. For example, I'd love to reduce packaging waste by wrapping gifts in fabric or reusable bags—but knowing the way Christmas Day tends to go down at my in-laws' house, I'm sure this theoretically sustainable packaging would just end up being tossed in the trash with all the rest of the wrappings. (We are already bucking the trend by saving the paper from our own presents so that the intact parts can be reused next year—much to the amusement of the rest of the family.)

Buying secondhand gifts is another idea I love in principle, as it's not only cheaper but reduces waste and energy use as well. In practice, though, I can never seem to get more than about 30 percent of our gifts this way. This year, as Thanksgiving approached, I thought we were in pretty good shape gift-wise; our yard-sale, book-sale, and Freecycle finds had yielded at least one secondhand gift for nearly everyone on Brian's side of the family, so I figured we'd just have to fill in with a few new items for my family members. But then reality kicked in. The gift lists submitted to us by the family members we hadn't yet shopped for were highly specific, and none of the items on them could be found secondhand. Moreover, most of the small items we'd already acquired ended up being deemed too small to be given as the sole gift, so we had to buy more stuff even for the folks I thought were already covered. Thus, within the past couple of weeks, both the number of presents and the total spent have nearly doubled.

Part of the problem is the sheer volume of gifts. This bothers me not just because of the expense—in fact, I honestly think it's not even primarily because of the expense—but because the more presents you give or receive, the less attention you can pay to any one of them. I would much rather receive only one present that's the right present, the one present that's just what I wanted (or better yet, just what I never knew I wanted until I saw it), than a dozen presents that are just okay—chosen by a dozen people, or half a dozen, who clearly picked them out because they had to get me something. And I would, all cost considerations aside, much rather give one present and have it be noticed and appreciated than give a dozen and have them be glanced at and tossed aside in the rush to get through the two-hour-long Rite of Opening.

Wouldn't it be nice, I mused to Brian one night, if we could just decide to give only presents that we truly believed the recipient would really, really love? And if we didn't happen to find a present that a given person would really love, we could just not give one, and know that there would be no hard feelings? Wouldn't it be great not have to worry about just finding something for every single person on our list? (You might think the easiest way to cut down on the shopping, and the associated worrying, would be to reduce the size of the list itself—but even if gift-giving were limited to the immediate family, that would still include 20 people: me, my husband, our parents, our siblings, their spouses, and their kids. And some of those people have birthdays in December as well, increasing the total number of presents still more.)

Alas, I fear this idea is no more than a pipe dream. Like reusable wrappings, the practice of giving presents selectively would probably be too foreign to the Christmastime culture of the family. Those who didn't get something would probably notice, and would probably feel hurt. And I guess, when all's said and done, it's better to put up with a bit of pre-holiday stress than to have hurt feelings at Christmastime. I just wish that there were some way to avoid both.

A Halloween dilemma

September is drawing to a close, and that means that stores are beginning to gear up for Halloween, with prominently placed displays of candy and costumes. (Well, actually, they've been doing this pretty much all throughout September; I just do my best to ignore it while it's still technically summertime.) In preparation for the annual candy-fest, I received a bulletin last weekend from Global Exchange, a Fair Trade organization, announcing a month-long program about choosing Fair Trade goodies for Halloween. This is an idea that I like in theory but have some problems with in practice, because the Fair Trade treats this site is promoting are Equal Exchange chocolate minis, which cost $35 for a box of 150 (the smallest size they offer). Now consider that last year, I paid just $4 (on sale) for two bags of mini Snickers bars from M&M Mars. This company is not 100% Fair Trade, but it got more than 20 percent of its cocoa last year from certified sustainable sources, making it the largest buyer of sustainably sourced cocoa in the world and putting the company ahead of schedule to reach its goal of 100 percent sustainability by 2020. I suppose you might argue that, for a product that's 100 percent sustainable instead of 20 percent sustainable, I ought to be willing to pay 5 times as much—but that would still be only $20, not $35 plus shipping. And sustainable treats from other companies, like Endangered Species chocolate, Divine, and Dagoba, are equally expensive or more so.

Now this week, Green America has stepped up to propose other alternatives. The bi-monthly Green American, which arrived in my mailbox on Friday, has an article on ways to "Green Your Halloween," starting with ditching candy in favor or "healthier treats and non-food 'treasures'" that are "recycled, natural, or sustainably sourced." It profiles Corey Colwell-Lipson, the founder of Green Halloween, who says that she founded her group because of concern about how candy harms children's health. The article cites the statistic that "One out of every three children is overweight, and the same number is expected to develop diabetes in their lifetime" as a result of "poor eating habits." The article doesn't attempt to explain exactly how a once-a-year candy splurge on Halloween qualifies as a "habit" that is supposedly responsible for child obesity and rising diabetes rates, but it does claim that when kids attending Green Halloween events see the alternatives to candy the group offers, "from polished stones and seashells to temporary tattoos and friendship bracelets," they invariably plump for these in place of candy. "[T]housands and thousands of kids came by," Colwell-Lipson claims, "and not one single child of any age, toddler to teen, said that they would rather have candy when they saw the alternatives. Not one."

Somehow, I can't help being just a bit skeptical about that claim. I realize it's been about 25 years since I last went trick-or-treating, but casting my memory back, it seems to me that if one of my neighbors had offered me a polished rock in place of a lollipop, I'd be pretty cheesed off. In fact, there were always a few killjoys who gave out things like colorful pencils instead of treats, and while my classmates and I generally refrained from TP'ing their houses, we certainly didn't respond with wild enthusiasm. Sure, I might have gladly forgone the candy in favor of something really cool, like a book or a little toy, but the problem with this is that even really cheap toys, such as you might find at the dollar store, are going to run about a buck apiece, while mini Snickers bars cost as little as eight cents apiece. And the same problems apply to pretty much all the items on the list of alternative treats proposed on the Green Halloween website. Either they're way more expensive than traditional candy (e.g., recycled glass tiles) or they're just, not to put too fine a point on it, lame (e.g, acorns, no matter how much they insist that "kids love items from nature"). A few of their suggestions (like toothpaste and miniature boxes of organic raisins) manage to fall into both categories.

So are there any realistic options for Halloween treats that are healthier and/or more sustainable, yet won't break the bank? In the past, it might have been possible to distribute homemade goodies, like popcorn balls or pumpkin seeds, but nowadays paranoid parents would snatch those away and dump them straight into the trash for fear of poisoning (even though there's no evidence that this has ever actually happened, even once). Even the CDC explicitly warns kids to "eat only factory-wrapped treats." So any homemade edibles are clearly out of the question. And any "factory-wrapped" edibles, such as the ones suggested on this site, are almost certain to cost more than mini candy bars. (Most of them have more calories, too, so it's questionable how much they'll actually help to reduce childhood obesity.)

The list of non-food treats on the same site includes some that are more reasonably priced, but most of them decidedly fail the coolness test. Of all the items on the list, these are the only ones that look both comparable to candy in price and likely to pass muster with kids of trick-or-treating age (which, in our area, can be anywhere from 3 to 16):

• Glow sticks. A flier we recently got in the mail advertised 5-packs of glow necklaces for $1—about twice as costly as a mini Snickers, but not so expensive as to be completely unreasonable.
• Temporary tattoos. (Stickers would also fall within the cost limits but are likely to be rejected as lame by kids over 10.)
• Coins. A quarter is likely to be more enthusiastically received than a Tootsie Pop—but that's because it's worth a lot more. A dime probably won't generate much excitement. So once again, this option means shelling out more per trick-or-treater.
• Used books. This one could be really cool in theory—I would have been a lot more excited as a kid to get a book while out trick-or-treating than a candy bar—but I recognize that not all kids would be equally enthused. Also, to make it work, you'd have to have a wide selection of books so that you could dole out age-appropriate selections to a wide range of kids. And to make it cost-effective, you'd have to be able to pick up a whole lot of books really cheaply—and have a way to get rid of whatever was left over come November 1.

Now, as it happens, I actually do have in my possession a fairly large collection, not of books, but of old Cricket magazines—accumulated during my childhood and only recently cleared out of my parents' house. My original plan was to give them to nieces and nephews for Christmas. But I've started wondering: would it actually be feasible to give these out to trick-or-treaters? Back when I was subscribing to Cricket, before it was split into two separate magazines for the under-9 and over-9 sets, the material was aimed at kids anywhere from age 5 to age 12, which covers most of the range of trick-or-treating age. The question is, would kids actually appreciate getting these? Would they, as Colwell-Lipson suggests, actually prefer them to candy? Or will they, instead, mentally classify me as I did the prissy neighbor who handed out pencils in lieu of goodies?

I'm kind of tempted to put this question to a practical test. I'd greet trick-or-treaters at the door on the 31st with two containers—a bowl filled with my usual mini Snickers treats, and a box of Cricket magazines—and offer them the choice: "Which would you like? Candy, or a magazine full of stories for kids?" Then I'd keep notes on how many kids opted for each choice, and based on the results, I'd have some idea whether to continue seeking out creative ideas for future Halloweens—or just stick with the Snickers bars, which I know won't get any complaints.