Archives for June 2007

We ended up getting a huge Macy’s gift card for our wedding three years ago, and were dismayed when we realized that after 2 years it had died with about $100 still on it. The problem was that for a long time the closest Macy’s was an hour’s drive away, and every time we went we wanted to spend it all, but just couldn’t bring ourselves to buy junk we really didn’t need. The card had been sitting in my desk gathering dust until I remembered that gift cards and certificates aren’t allowed to expire in California. So I sent the card to my friend in San Francisco, they brought it into Macy’s, and after a quick phone call by the clerk a brand new gift card was re-issued. It was resurrected! I let her use it. 🙂

I’m not sure if this will work everywhere, but my friend and I mused that this could potentially be a business idea – “Send us our expired gift cards and we will save them… for a fee.”

Here’s are some links to states that I found with laws that restrict the expiration of gift cards, either with a minimum lifetime of X years or by banning expiration entirely – California, Connecticut, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Washington. Let me know if I missed any.

Even though we’re still trying to avoid “lifestyle inflation”, we find that there are certain things that once you achieve, they are very, very hard to give up. Here’s just a few:

Living in a house, as opposed to an apartment
We started renting a single-family house two years ago, as opposed to a duplex or apartment complex. No more worrying about loud parties, television speakers, stomping feet, or people stealing my mail. No longer do I curse the invention of 5.1 surround sound and cheap speaker systems with subwoofers. I really don’t want to live in a condo again, but maybe I just need to live in nicer buildings than I used to…

Now I have to worry about not getting used to having too much square footage. I don’t think that’ll be a problem where we’re living, though.

Having your own washer and dryer
After having our own washer and dryer in the house, I don’t think I have ever go back to lugging 30 pounds of dirty laundry to the laundromat every few weeks. But somehow I did it for 7 years with no real ill effect. Of course, I did have to buy 30 pairs of boxers for those busy times when I couldn’t find time to make the trip.

Cellular phones
A few months ago I was actually trying to cancel my wireless service completely and have one less monthly bill, but I couldn’t pull the trigger. It’s actually pathetic how I use cell phones as a crutch for everything. Instead of actually making solid plans with people, everyone just wings it – “I’ll call you.” Instead of getting an address and using a map, you just call your friend once you get somewhere in the vicinity. I called a free 411 service about ten times this month alone when trying to find restaurant hours or locations. Good thing I found the Sprint SERO plan!

TiVo or other Digital VCR
I could probably live without cable TV, but if I have cable TV, I would need TiVo. I can’t really explain it. Just the idea of planning around commercial breaks or remembering to tape something every week seems completely alien to me now.

Is there an appliance, service, or other seemingly small thing that you now can’t live without?

Recently, my friend Yogin told me about a website called Farecast.com. It’s actually been around for a while now but somehow I’ve missed it… so maybe you have as well. There’s basically two parts to the website that are unique. Let’s say I’m planning a trip from Portland to San Francisco on 7/25-8/1. First they provide me the lowest fare history, which charts the lowest fare for your trip for up to the last 90 days:

Pretty cool! You can try to predict any trends yourself or simply see if you’re getting a good price relative to recent history. Another possible way to use the historical information is to help you decide what to bid on a site like Priceline.com or what to accept on Hotwire.

But FareCast also provides their own 7-day fare prediction to help you decide whether to buy now or wait. The arrow show how confident they are about it based on their algorithms:

To me, I would think the fare might actually rise more given the graph. But according to an independent audit, Farecast’s prediction accuracy was 74.5 percent. Not bad, but not awesome? But they’ll also put a little money where their mouths are by offering fare insurance when they are confident you should wait. Here’s how it works:

So you pay $10 upfront and wait. If they are wrong and prices go up, they reimburse you the difference. If they are right and prices go down, hopefully you saved at least $10. Worst case, prices stay the same and you’re out $10. This is interesting… anyone use this insurance before? Either way, I’ll definitely use this site in the future as part of my airfare research.

Added
Kayak is great, but don’t forget to try and book directly on the airline’s websites whenever possible, so you can take advantage of price drop refunds.

First, I just want to say thanks for all the great and helpful comments on my post on trying to find a new mattress. I read every single comment, used many of them, and have purchased a new mattress! But before going into that I wanted to do a quick summary of all the tips.

Don’t go cheap. But don’t overpay, either.
Most readers, my friends, and even our parents told us not to go cheap on a mattress. People say you spend a third of your life on this thing. I agree that you shouldn’t buy solely based on price. But as you’ll see below, buying a mattress is intentionally confusing for the consumer, and the price on the exact same quality mattress can vary literally by a thousand dollars! So I respectfully disagree with “you get what you pay for”. Being frugal isn’t the same as being cheap! It’s shopping smart.

Go out to some stores and try them out.
Another good piece of advice that I got was to go out to the stores and try them all out. As reader and former mattress salesman Tim F suggests, you should wear some comfortable clothes (no skirts for women!) and spend at least 5 minutes laying on each bed exactly as you would normally sleep. You’re dropping a grand on something that’s supposed to last 10 years, so take your time and don’t let anyone rush you.

The exact same mattress can have 50 different names…
Chesterfield? Summerbrooke? Belmont? While looking at traditional coil mattresses, every single store had a different British name for what looked like the exact same bed. This is on purpose. From MattressHotline:

Why does each retailer have a different name for the same product?
This gives each retailer the opportunity to set their own unique price points and also give the perception of exclusivity.

Translation: We have huge profit margins, and we don’t want to enable you to easily comparison shop.

Check out this huge list of equivalent names just for the Simmons brand alone. I mean, I’ve heard of rebadging products, but a separate name for every store? Some brands attempt to justify this by using slightly different fabrics or designs that cover the identical mattresses. If you can figure out the name game, they also have comfort and durability guides that may be useful. (Thanks to reader John Tarnok.)

As for memory foam beds, I’m sure it’s equally hard to compare across brands. A salesperson said that Tempurpedic has a patent on their specific type of foam, so no other brand would be able to exactly offer the same product. My feeling is that as time goes by the copycats will catch up soon enough.

…so everyone can offer low-price guarantees.
You may have noticed that every single mattress store guarantees the lowest price. These names are why!! It gives them complete discretion. If they are willing to match your price, then they’ll give you an “equivalent” mattress (be careful that it is indeed equivalent). If they aren’t willing to go that low, they can simply say that it’s not the same mattress.

Our Experience – Trying to create our own Heavenly Bed

Like many people, we stayed at a Westin hotel (thanks to the Starwood American Express card) and we really liked their Heavenly Bed. In fact, you can buy the mattress and linens directly from them or also at Nordstrom’s. A queen mattress set with no linens is $1450 (including shipping). Recently there was even a 40% off coupon which someone was nice enough to e-mail me, but it’s now expired. So we had to create our own!
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