Stuff Most People Pay Too Much For

First of all, apologies for the two-week delay since my last entry. My new job writing reports for ConsumerSearch has been keeping me so busy that I haven't had time to blog except on weekends—and between Yom Kippur services with my mom on Saturday and a fall-equinox celebration with friends on Sunday, last weekend was crammed full.

By the by, let me take a moment here to insert a plug for ConsumerSearch, an incredibly handy site that I would recommend even if I weren't working for them. Here's an example of how it works. Suppose you're shopping for, say, a TV set. Normally, you might start by consulting Consumer Reports to see which models they recommend. Then you might check a few other publications that have reviews of electronic items, such as Wired, to see if they agree with those recommendations. If you really wanted to be thorough, maybe you'd go to a site like Amazon.com or Epinions.com to see what users have to say about the model you're interested in: do they like it, or have they discovered problems with it that didn't show up in the professionals' tests? And finally, once you'd settled on a TV, you'd visit several sites to compare prices before deciding where to buy it.

Well, ConsumerSearch does all that work for you. We consult the best publications and the user review sites, and then we report on what we find there and make recommendations in several categories; for a TV, these might be different types—LCD, plasma, etc.—or different sizes, or different price ranges. You can click on a link to read more about the particular product that interests you and see price comparisons from around the Web. Having worked on these reports, I can attest that they're very thorough; it takes me about 30 hours of work to research and write one, but it only takes about fifteen minutes to read it and have everything set out neatly for you. And if you have even less time than that to spare, you can read just the front page, where we identify the top products, with a paragraph about each one laying out its pros and cons.

I think this is a really great tool for the ecofrugal, because it helps you spend your money wisely (and protect the environment at the same time by choosing products that will last, rather than needing replacement after a year or so). ConsumerSearch reports don't generally focus specifically on the "green" features of a product, but we do, where appropriate, include "green" products as one of our Best-Reviewed categories (for example, with laundry detergents).

So there's my pitch. We now return you to our regularly scheduled blog entry, the topic of which is: Stuff Most People Pay Too Much For. This idea was inspired the article "6 Outrageously Overpriced Products," which has become the subject of a lively discussion in the Dollar Stretcher forums. The six items in the article are movie theater popcorn, greeting cards, textbooks, bottled water, printer ink, and designer clothing. This struck me as a good list of items to discuss in ecofrugal terms, because one thing that struck me about them was just how many of these overpriced items are also wasteful from an ecological point of view.

Bottled water, for instance, has been the subject of a whole campaign by the Center for a New American Dream, an organization with an ecofrugal focus, which points out how much energy and material is wasted in making, filling, shipping, and disposing of all those plastic bottles and urges people to replace them with reusable bottles they can fill from the tap. When I first applied to work for ConsumerSearch, they asked me to audition, as it were, by writing a sample report on bottled water using sources they provided. This process reinforced what I'd already learned about just how wasteful bottled water really is. The sources revealed that (1) municipal drinking water is actually held to higher safety standards than bottled water, (2) tap water costs about half a cent per gallon, while bottled water can cost anywhere from 79 cents a gallon for a supermarket brand to a whopping $159 a gallon for the fancy French stuff, and (3) in blind taste tests, tap water generally fares as well as or better than bottled water.

Likewise, new printer cartridges are not only expensive but also wasteful. Throwing out a whole cartridge and buying a new one just because it's out of ink is even more of a waste than discarding a bottle because you've finished the water. Refilling the ink cartridges is a much better use of resources—including cash. We bought a big bottle of black ink and a color refill kit for our inkjet printer several years back, and it cost us about as much as a single new cartridge; since then, we have refilled the cartridges many times and had no problems. We did eventually have to replace one of them because the print head got too worn down to work, but that's a much better deal than replacing it every single time it runs out of ink. (Back when we bought the printer, the sales guy tried to dissuade us from refilling the colored ink cartridges, claiming that this would "destroy the print heads." Um, okay, so if it does, we'll have to do what? Buy a new cartridge, right? Which is exactly what we'll have to do if we don't refill it, right? So what do we have to lose by trying it?)

Greeting cards and textbooks? They're not exactly wasteful, but there may be better alternatives. A hand-written note is more thoughtful, and probably more welcome, than what Miss Manners calls the "canned sentiments" of a store-bought greeting card, and if you want it to go on a pretty card, you can get nice blank ones that are suitable for all occasions for a very reasonable cost. (I actually get mine for nothing; I have two partially-used boxes of them that I've received as gifts from family members, and a bunch more that I've been sent as "gifts" from organizations looking for donations.) And I've heard of colleges making their course textbooks available in electronic format, for download to either an e-reader or a personal computer. (One of my own publishing clients reportedly says, "The book is dead" and prophesies that in future all their material will be published in electronic formats. This may be a bit of an overstatement—as I observed back in June, there are still plenty of good reasons to prefer a book rather than an e-reader for curling up with—but for textbooks, I think the advantages of easy-to-update electronic media may well outweigh those of print.)

Designer clothing isn't as green as thrift-shop clothes, but it's not necessarily less green than new clothing from a low-end retailer. But boy, the cost differences sure are shocking. This was brought home to me recently when I got a free trial issue of Real Simple magazine in the mail, and the page on "Trends Worth Trying" featured a big handbag that the editors promised was "destined to be a classic." It's a nice enough bag, if you like that sort of thing—multicolored cotton canvas with leather trim (you can see a picture here)—and it measures a capacious 15 by 23 inches, but the price tag was a jaw-dropping $998. Nearly a thousand dollars. For a handbag. The ironic part was that right before that page, there was a two-page advertising spread devoted to the Merona line of clothes, sold at Target. The model is wearing a classic-yet-modern plaid trench coat with jeans and riding boots, and she's carrying a large black tote priced at $25. I actually like this bag better than the Ralph Lauren one, not just because it's basic black and will go with everything, but also because it's made of faux-leather, with no real leather parts. No animals were harmed in the making of this bag. It's not as big as the Ralph Lauren "weekender," but for one-fortieth the price, I think I'd happily make that compromise.

Movie theater popcorn, by the same token, isn't necessarily more wasteful than home-popped corn; it's just way, way more expensive. But it's an expense we haven't had to deal with in years, because we've pretty much stopped going to movies. It's not just that we balk at paying $10 for a ticket to a movie we know we'll most likely be able to check out of a Redbox in another few months for $1 (or out of the library for nothing); we actually prefer watching them at home. We can sit on our own comfy couch instead of the theater's seats, which may or many not work properly; we don't have pick our way through other people's spilled popcorn and sticky gum; we don't have to sit through a half-hour of annoying advertisements and trailers for movies we would never want to see before getting to the one we came to see; we don't have to listen to children screaming or adults yakking on their cell phones before (and sometimes during) the movie; we can hit the pause button when we have to pee, instead of either pushing past a row of people twice (coming and going) and missing part of the film, or else sitting through half the movie with a full bladder; and we can make our own popcorn for pennies a bowl. (Of course, I won't deny that all the discomforts I just mentioned are only exacerbated by the fact that you have to pay through the nose for the privilege of being subjected to them. But even if the cost were the same, I think we'd still prefer a home movie night to a trip to the theater.)

When I started writing this entry, I was planning to discuss another article as well, sent to me by my mom: "Ten things that aren't free - but should be (and how to get them for free anyway)." But looking at the ten items covered in this article (checking accounts, corkage fees, directory assistance, driving cross country, TV, movie rentals, college tuition, books, toothbrushes, and online games), I find that they don't strike me as wasteful in the same way as the items on the first list. They are, for the most part, items worth having; they're just not necessarily worth paying for. Also, this article seems to be pretty long already. So perhaps I'll save a discussion of those items for another day. Watch this space for "Stuff Most People Pay Too Much For, Part 2."

News from the bathroom front

The good news is that we have just finished painting the downstairs bathroom, and it looks fabulous. The sponging-off technique came out just as I envisioned it: a subtle, opulent, warm, sort of Tuscan-stucco effect. The bad news is that we did the entire bathroom with just one quart of glaze, leaving us with an extra quart that, because it's a custom color, can't be returned. A bit of a setback for ecofrugality. But I guess, when you look at the project as a whole, not too large a setback. Perhaps we can donate the other quart to the Habitat ReStore.

And talking of the Habitat ReStore, the other good news is that we made a trip up there on Saturday and picked up four boxes of that gorgeous Italian ceramic tile that we were able to get only a sample of on our last visit. The fact that it's Italian gave me a bit of pause (hmm, that's a lot of miles to market), but the fact that it came from the Habitat store seemed to give it automatic ecofrugal cred, since it wouldn't be there if it weren't some sort of leftover material that could otherwise have gone to waste. And while I know we could probably have found some sort of tile that we would consider acceptable for less than $2.67 a square foot, this stuff looks like slate, costs way less, and will require less maintenance. Score another point for ecofrugality. The other bad news, though, is that these 14-by-14-inch tiles are too big to fit into our yard-sale tile cutter, so we'll have to do them by hand. A bit more work. But hey, fewer grout lines.

Tune in for our next exciting episode, when you may hear Amy say, "Can't we get any grout that's closer to the color of the tile?"

Work in progress

Those who followed this blog last February and March will recall that just last spring, Brian and I finished up the long-drawn-out process of remodeling, or refinishing, or what have you, our large downstairs room (which, by the by, is still being referred to as the downstairs room, as we have yet to come up with a more suitable name for it). During the summer months, we did a bit of messing around outside—planting the garden, painting the shutters, and so on—but only in the past few weeks did we really make a determined start on our next big project: remodeling (or refinishing, or what have you) the downstairs bathroom.

As with the big room remodel, we're aiming to keep this project as ecofrugal as possible. To that end, we're reusing as much as we can of what's already there. Fortunately for us, some bits of this room have been updated fairly recently. We got the seller to replace the old shower, which was cracked and leaking, back when we bought the house, so that's one big job we don't need to do ourselves. And the old water-hog of a toilet with its mismatched lid (which you can see in the photo) broke in our second year of ownership and was replaced with a sleek, efficient model. But pretty much everything else in the room—sink, walls, floor, lighting—has to be redone.

A couple of months ago, we made a start by removing all the old vinyl tile, which wasn't good-looking enough to be worth salvaging. Just in the past few weeks, we started in earnest with patching the damaged walls, slapping on something like a gallon of drywall in the process. We also moved the old bathroom fan (which originally was not only wired up wrong but also vented directly into the side of the cement porch steps) to a side wall—a process that involved actually breaching the hull of the house to make room for the new vent, which felt oddly daring. And we installed a new canister light in the ceiling where the fan used to be. By late last week, we'd finally managed to bring the room to a state that might be considered a blank canvas: all the fixtures and flooring removed, the walls repaired and freshly primed. In other words, we've finished all the taking away we need to do in the room, and we're ready to start adding, which is always more interesting.

Step one is going to be painting the walls, and in what may be an overly ambitious move, I've set my heart on a two-toned, sponge-painted effect. The base coat (Valspar's "Cream Cake") is drying now, and our next free evening will probably be devoted to the more elaborate process of first rolling on and then sponging off the tinted glaze ("Golden Moon"). After that, it's on to adventures in tiling, a new experience for both of us. We're going with ceramic tile, as a more durable and therefore greener alternative to vinyl, and I'm hoping our nearby Habitat Restore will provide a nice-looking tile at a reasonable price. If it's leftover or salvaged from a building site, then it will be both eco and frugal.

Watch this space for updates!

Summertime blues

Sigh. After a week of cooler weather that lulled me into thinking fall might be arriving early, we have been dumped back into the dog days, with highs in the nineties for most of this week. This may be the proper place for a somewhat shocking confession: I don't really like summer. I never have. Even when I was a kid, summer "vacation" to me was just three months during which I wouldn't get to see much of my friends, since most of them lived in other towns and my parents did not care to be treated as a taxi service. A book I was reading last month quoted Henry James as saying, "Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language," and my reaction was, "Not in New Jersey, they aren't." Around here, summer evenings can sometimes be pleasant—if they're tolerably cool and the mosquitoes aren't too bad—but summer afternoons tend to be stifling.

So I always look forward to fall, and you would think I would appreciate the efforts of the local shopkeepers to bring it to me early with their autumn-themed displays. To me, however, those cheerful stuffed scarecrows and bundles of bright leaves have exactly the opposite effect. When the temperature is 93 degrees, it's perfectly obvious that fall isn't here, and pretending it is just seems like a cruel joke.

Actually, I think I've mentioned elsewhere on this blog that I generally resent the way stores always try to get the jump on the natural cycle of the seasons. Around here, for example, the "back to school" displays went up before school had been out a month, and now, with the schools not even open yet, they're already giving way to scarecrows and bags of candy for Halloween, which is still over two months away. But by the time Halloween actually gets here, there won't be so much as a plastic pumpkin to be found, because the shelves will already be decked out in their Christmas finery (skipping right over Thanksgiving as if it didn't count, since only the grocery stores can actually sell anything for that holiday). Then it will be Valentine red and pink in January, Easter pastels in February while the snow is still thick on the ground, and charcoal and flags for the Glorious Fourth in the middle of April.

Am I the only one who's bugged by this? Am I the only one who feels that to every thing there is a season, and mid-August is not the season for Halloween costumes? I realize the stores just want to sell their wares, and they think they'll sell most if they get an early start. But does it ever occur to them that people might not really be in the mood to do their Christmas shopping in mid-October—that in fact, seeing those premature reminders of the approaching festive season may actually sap their holiday cheer before the holiday even arrives?

To me, it seems like anyone who appreciates nature at all should want to recognize and respect the cycle of the seasons. That's why I like to eat asparagus in April, strawberries in June, zucchini in July, tomatoes in September, and apples in October. I like to appreciate what the earth has to offer in its proper season, rather than buying strawberries shipped up from Guatemala in the middle of winter (which are never much good anyway, since they had to be picked well before they were ripe to survive the journey, and by the time they arrive half of them are still green and the other half already mushy). And I want to put on my Halloween costume at Halloween and put up my Christmas lights at Christmastime—not two months before.

So maybe it's time to get a grip on myself and stop fretting over the hot weather. Maybe I just need to go pick some ripe cherry tomatoes, fix myself a glass of cold lemonade, settle down in the shade, and appreciate what's left of August.

The Frugal Suitor

Someone on the Dollar Stretcher forums posted a link to this article in last week's New York Times: "How to Be Frugal and Still Be Asked on Dates." The upshot of it seems to be that although saving money has become a lot more popular and socially acceptable in the past couple of years, it's still widely seen as a turn-off in the dating world. In a way, this makes sense, if you think of the way our society has traditionally been structured: women of earlier generations had to marry to achieve financial security, so a man hoping to attract a mate would flash around his money to prove that he had plenty of it. Unfortunately, this strategy is likely to backfire, since a spendthrift mate is actually less likely to have money in the bank with which to support a family. It also creates a problem for frugal folks seeking partners with similar inclinations. Spending lavishly on your partner, as seems to be expected during courtship, is a good way to attract a mate with expensive tastes—not someone who's prudent with money.

Amy Dacyczyn wrestled with this problem in the first Tightwad Gazette book. She pointed out that a marriage is more likely to work out if both partners have the same views about money. Unfortunately, it's hard to find a frugal partner when society expects you to spend extravagantly while dating. So her suggestion to tightwads seeking same was to resist this urge, which sends the wrong message to potential partners, and instead put out "frugal date bait." Her examples include home-grown flowers, home-cooked dinners, picnics in the park, and for the truly adventurous, "tightwad dates" like an afternoon of yard-saling. With this type of "bait," rather than expensive outings and gifts, you're more likely to attract a mate who doesn't value a romantic gesture based on how much it costs.

Speaking for myself, I can honestly say that frugal dates and gifts are my favorite kind. It's not that I don't appreciate the occasional fancy meal or expensive present—especially coming from my fellow-tightwad husband, who never spends extravagantly on himself. But the little things, in their way, mean even more. One of the first "dates" Brian and I ever had together was a visit to a big sort of gallery/flea market. I tried on a dress at one of the secondhand clothing booths, and he admired it so much that he bought it for me—for all of $15. It was such an impulsive, romantic gesture that I cherish that dress to this day, even though I haven't been that size in years.

Calloo, callay!

Just had to celebrate a couple of freebies that fell into my lap today:

1) Coupons.com, which usually has few if any coupons for products I have any interest in, today popped one up for Blue Bunny ice cream, my absolute favorite brand. It's a premium brand like Breyer's, but without the premium price: only $3 a carton at the Shop-Rite, so with the dollar-off coupon, it's only $2. Or, if we wait for it to go on sale for $2 a carton, which happens not infrequently, we could get it for only $1. Hooray!

2) Also, I just discovered that the DIY Network site now has the first two seasons of Wasted Spaces (which, as you may recall, I described in a previous entry as the best home show ever) available to view. I've already viewed all of Seasons 3 and 4 on Hulu, so finding a whole 26 more episodes that I haven't seen yet is like being given a wonderful present.

Ice cream and fluffy TV—does it get any better than this?

The Great Bulb Debate

I recently read an article on LiveCheap article about "How to Cut Your Electricity in Half." As with so many of these articles, the number one suggestion was to replace incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent lights (CFLs). This suggestion sparked a couple of comments to the effect that CFLs are (1) hard to dispose of safely, (2), dangerous if they break (one poster suggested that you would "require a HAZMAT crew to come and clean if God forbid you drop one and break it"), and (3) inferior to the newer, still-more-efficient light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs.

I had previously encountered similar suggestions in a Dollar Stretcher article by Rich Finzer, "CFL versus LED." Finzer claimed that CFLs "are extremely fragile, perform poorly in cold locations, and are nearly impossible to recycle," and also that they "require a warm-up period before reaching full illumination." He went on to claim that LEDs were "a smarter choice" because of their longer life and ultra-low energy use.

After reading his article, I submitted a post on the Dollar Stretcher forum debunking his claims. I pointed out that Consumer Reports had addressed these claims in a recent issue (you can read the "myths and realities" on the magazine's blog). It said that most modern CFLs come on instantly and reach their full brightness within about 30 seconds (a delay that I hardly even notice with mine; even at less than full brightness, the bulbs are plenty bright enough to see by). It also points out that unbroken CFLs are accepted for recycling at all IKEA and Home Depot stores, as well as some Ace and True Value stores, and that broken ones, while they do pose a health hazard, are not nearly so difficult to clean up as some people think. (The EPA provides detailed guidelines at this site.)

Then I went on to tackle the question of the economics of CFLs versus LEDs. There is no denying that in terms of bulb life and energy use, LEDs are greatly superior to CFLs, just as CFLs are to incandescents. The only question was whether the energy savings would be enough to offset the much higher initial cost of the LED bulbs. I crunched some numbers and concluded that in terms of their lifetime cost, an LED bulb came out just barely ahead of a CFL--but it would take most of the lifetime of the bulb, which could be more than 15 years, to pay for itself. I concluded that while LEDs might indeed be the bulbs of the future, it was worth waiting for the price to come down before making the switch.

After reading the Live Cheap article, I decided to revisit these figures and see if the price of LEDs had come down enough in the past two years to make them cost-effective. I found that the cost of an LED bulb has indeed fallen—but so have the prices of CFLs. The price of incandescents has actually gone up, but so has their lifetime. Here are the updated figures, based on a search of products available at Amazon.com:

1. GE 60-watt incandescents: 4 for $1.99, estimated lifetime 1,500 hours

2. GE 13-watt CFLs, claimed equivalent to 60W incandescents: 8 for $6.99, estimated lifetime 12,000 hours

3. EagleLight Nichia 6-watt LED, claimed equivalent to 60W incandescents: $43 each (with free shipping), estimated lifetime 35,000 hours. (I had to go to the manufacturer's page to get this information.)

The other thing that's changed is that my utlility's price for electricity has dropped by half a cent per kilowatt-hour. Between that and the changes in price, the lifetime costs of all three types of bulbs have dropped significantly. Over the course of 35,000 hours of use, you would pay for:

1. 23 incandescent bulbs at 50 cents each ($11.66) and 2100 kilowatt-hours at 17.5 cents per kWH ($367.5): total $379.16

2. 3 CFLs at 87.4 cents each ($2.62) and 455 kilowatt-hours at 17.5 cents per kWH ($79.63): total $82.25

3. 1 LED at $43 and 210 kilowatt-hours at 17.5 cents per kWH ($36.75): total $79.75

So once again, the LED is just barely ahead of the CFLs on lifelong costs. (Of course, there are other factors that might make LEDs more desirable, like the fact that they'll last nearly forever. Thirty-five thousand hours in a fixture that's used 5 hours a day is over 19 years. That might make LEDs practical in fixtures that are really, really inconvenient to change a bulb in.)

I'm keeping my CFLs for now and waiting for the price of LEDs to drop more (as I'm sure it will). After all, I paid $25 for my first CFL years ago (and this was an old-school CFL, bulky and not as warm-toned as an incandescent)—so when LEDs get down into that approximate price range, I think it'll be worth springing for one.

However, one thing these figures really reinforce for me is what a small amount of electricity we're talking about here. Even the relatively power-hungry incandescent bulb is using only $367.50 worth of electricity over the course of 19 years, or about $1.60 a month. Someone who is hoping to cut his electric bill in half by switching out a few light bulbs is probably in for a serious disappointment.

Postscript: Just spotted this entry on the Consumer Reports blog about a new LED bulb being sold at Home Depot that costs only $20. However, this model is intended to replace a 40-watt incandescent, so it doesn't fit neatly into my comparisons above. It's certainly cheaper over its lifetime than a 13-watt CFL, but it also gives less light. I'm not planning to buy any, but I'll be keeping an eye out for higher-wattage versions.