Archives for June 2011

Unhealthy food is a lot cheaper than healthy food, on a price-per-calorie basis. This is illustrated in this chart about how many calories you can buy for a dollar from the Lapham’s Quarterly magazine, which corresponds to my own research ranking how much 200 calories of different foods cost:

Cost of 200 Calories: Less than 50 cents
Glazed Donut $0.23	Potato Chips $0.33	Snickers $0.40	Gummy Bears $0.40

.

Cost of 200 Calories: Over $1.00
Dried Apricots $2.19	Baby Carrots $2.50	Grapes $2.55	Red Onions $1.35

Recently the NYT Economix blog charted the historical change in price for different food categories relative to overall CPI inflation since 1978. This shows that the price gap is growing. For example, the the price of soda has dropped more than 30%, while the price of fresh fruits and vegetables has gone up more than 30% (both relative to other prices in general).

Source: NYT, BLS

It is pointed out that it costs about $5 to buy 2,000 calories at McDonald’s, $19 to buy 2,000 calories worth of canned tuna and $60 to buy 2,000 calories worth of lettuce.

But I’m not sure this means what we think it means. Do people really buy junk food because they need cheap calories? I think most unhealthy people get plenty of calories. Also, if you simply ate mostly rice and beans, you’d get plenty of calories for even less than McDonald’s. If all foods were the same price, would we really eat that much better? Perhaps it would help, but I don’t think lower prices would solve obesity.

I think the problem is people just eat what they want, and what they want happens to have way too many calories. If more health problems are caused by being overweight than malnutrition, then unhealthy people need less calories more than they need “better nutritional quality” calories. There are many studies that show that the less calories you eat, the longer you’ll live. Even severe calorie restriction (near-starvation) is believed to result in longer lives in a variety of animals including mice and monkeys.

What do people in countries where starvation is a real concern eat? Mostly rice with a little fish for flavor. Mostly beans and lentils with spices for flavor. Mostly cassava with a little meat and vegetables for flavor. They don’t eat a huge variety of things, and they eat mostly carbs. But they eat a lot less. If we can’t lower the prices of healthy unprocessed food, maybe we just need to eat less in general. But that takes self-control, which can also be hard to come by.

The following is a guest post from my wife, aka Mrs. MMB. I was whining like a spoiled child about how I needed to write up extra posts for when we’re traveling this week, so she kindly offered up her own tips.

Jonathan and I love eating fresh foods, and it tastes even better when we harvest it straight from our yard. We don’t actually have much space – just a 9 foot wide strip of land next to our house – but our garden is now so plentiful, that we are able to incorporate fresh veggies and herbs into almost every meal that we cook at home. Although the initial start up costs added up (a new garden and soaker hose, soil, and seeds), here are some frugal gardening tips that I learned:

Buy seeds. Seeds take a little longer to grow, but are much cheaper than seedlings at Home Depot. For example, one packet of thirty bell pepper seeds cost $1.99, where as one seedling costs $.99 to $3.99, depending on the size of your seedling.

Trade seeds with your friends: I always have an excess of seeds (I don’t really need 30 bell pepper plants!), so I bring my seed packets and extra seedlings to work and trade them with friends and co-workers. I also like to trade cuttings with co-workers; mint and sweet potato are especially easy to grow from cuttings. That way, I always have a variety of seeds and plants on hand, all for a very reasonable price of free.

Make your own compost. Like any gardener, I have a daily battle with pests and clay soil, but I try to do everything organically with things like Neem oil and self-made compost. Compost enriches our soil, and it decreases the quantity of kitchen scraps that go into our trash. Coffee grounds are especially rich in nitrogen and something that I would have otherwise thrown out. I really dig the fancy commercial compost bins, but they can easily cost more than $100 for the bin. Instead, I made my own compost bin from extra pieces of plywood and chicken wire. There are a lot of DIY compost bin instructions on the internet. I’ll be upgrading to a bigger bin soon, but for now, my little bin produces nice earthy compost.

Recycle! I love the idea of reusing household trash, and I use take-out chopsticks to label plants, an old milk carton to collect kitchen scraps, a plastic orange juice container as my “watering can”, and as an alternative to expensive jiffy pots, I like to use egg cartons to plant seedlings. Recycling, can also provide excellent alternative to expensive bell jars: I recently had a problem with especially voracious pill bugs, and I now use old water and soda bottles as cloches and bell jars to protect the seedlings from the bugs.

I also wanted pretty trellises, but a fancy manufactured trellis, though very pretty, can be expensive. Instead, I made trellises with inexpensive PVC pipes and a recycled old plastic fence that we would have otherwise thrown out. I simply screwed the PVC pipe onto the fence and bought a couple of two-foot rebar poles ($2.99 each) to anchor the “new” trellis into the ground. Voila! A vertical space for cucumbers, peas, and morning glories for less than $10!

Overall, I spend a few hours every weekend weeding, sowing, transplanting, and tilling, and 15 minutes everyday watering and harvesting goodies for our dinner. While I agree that gardening is not for everyone, I find gardening a very relaxing and rewarding hobby.

You may have heard of a huge annual coupon book that is known simply as The Entertainment Book. Compiled specifically for your local area, it includes discounts for restaurants, movie tickets, movie attractions, and services like car repair or nail salons. The most common are 2-for-1 or 50% off. If you enter your zip code online, you’ll be able to see the coupons inside ahead of time. (Some people also buy books from tourist places like Orlando or Hawaii.)

The retail price varies by area, but is usually around $35 to $50, although you can usually find an addition discount on the site (they know their target demographic of bargain hunters). Currently, you can buy the 2011 book for about $5 + free shipping if you agree to pre-order the 2012 book at $5 off retail + free shipping. In addition, you can go through the shopping portal Mr. Rebates ($5 bonus) and get an additional 30% cash back.

I have never bought one myself, mostly because of my love/hate relationship with coupons. I love discounts but never seem to remember to bring coupons along, and that makes it even worse than not having it at all! However, I was recently given an Entertainment Book as a present. This thing is thick! It was a thoughtful gift, and now I can actually see if this thing will save me money.

So far, flipping through it, I’m happy to see that they do cover a lot of nearby vendors. The deals are very localized, so my preliminary advice would be to look through the deals online, and add up which ones you know you can use without changing your existing shopping habits. Then, cut your expected saving by 50% for a margin of error. If you can still save money after that, then consider purchasing.

Have you bought an Entertainment Book before? If so, did you find it worth the purchase price?

• Yes, I've bought one before and yes, I thought it was worth it.
• Yes, I've bought one before but no, it wasn't worth it.
• No, never bought one before.

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If you want to start a lively conversation online, just bring up the topic of tipping. Keep The Change is basically a book that interviews the actual workers in the service industry to find how they view gratuities. The author is Steve Dublanica, which you may know from the Waiter Rant blog, and the tagline is “A Clueless Tipper’s Quest to Become the Guru of the Gratuity”.

The book starts with the history and origins of tipping. Why do we tip at all? To Insure Prompt Service? If you give the tips beforehand or regularly it can help, but that’s most likely not where the term comes from. Is it to reward good service after the fact? Again, probably not.

It turns out that the quality of service by the waitperson has almost no effect on what size tip s/he receives. Good service, awful service, whatever. In fact, researchers found the statistical correlation between service quality and tip to be merely 0.2. That’s about the same correlation as between service quality and how sunny it is outside. The author explores the many real reasons why people tip, and many of them have to do with psychological issues of avoiding shame, providing generosity, seeking approval, or showing off. Sometimes it’s plain bribery.

The rest of the book is organized into the different service industries. Waiters and waitresses. Bartenders. Coffee shop baristas. Beauty salons. Strip clubs. Casinos. Hotels (doormen, maids, bellhops, concierge). Cars (parking, mechanics, car wash). I love these kind of behind-the-scenes books that reveal their hidden attitudes and experiences.

I won’t divulge all the details, but my one-line takeaway from this book was “Everyone wants at least 15%”. We all know waiters. But a bartender wants 15-20% of the drink price total as well. Baristas from Starbucks to the super-fancy foam art places also want 15-20% of the drink price. Masseuses and haircuts? 15-20%. Note that this is what they deem appropriate, not what everyone actually gives.

Surprised? I’m betting this book will contain at least one new discovery for everyone. Hotel maids would like 2-3 dollars each day separately (a different person cleans the room each day). I used to just tip when I checked out because otherwise they may think I’m just leaving cash around. To avoid confusion, use a marked envelope. Tricky!

Another underlying theme seems to be how greedy business owners are simply shifting the role of paying their employees onto the customers. In fact, that’s quite possibly how tipping got started on sleeper train porters in 1894! And the customers pay up, promoting more “tip creep”. For most of the people interviewed, tips now end up making up 10-40% of their total income.

I’d rather everyone be paid a fair wage and everything to be rolled into the upfront price, but I appreciate this book because if I know the expected gratuity then I can include that in my own mental pricing. If I do use the service, I want to tip properly. But if the tip makes things too expensive, then I simply won’t use the service. For example, I might be okay with paying for a $100 massage but not a $120 one. If you hate not knowing expected customs as much as I do, I recommend this book.

I’ll be honest, I did not see the success of Netflix coming. I thought it was a nice, cute DVD rental business that would probably be bought out by Blockbuster eventually, leaving their founders stupendously rich. But look around today: Blockbuster is bankrupt, and Netflix now has more subscribers than any U.S. cable or satellite provider, including Comcast.

That’s more than 24 million customers and growing (9 million added last year). Since the start of 2009, shares of NFLX stock are up 828% to $260 a share. Online streaming of Netflix videos now takes up 30% of all downstream bandwidth during peak hours. All those DVDs flying back and forth make up more than $600 million a year of the US Postal Service’s revenue.

I’ve been a customer of Netflix on and off during the last few years. I don’t watch very many movies in theaters, so when I feel like I’m falling behind popular culture references, I subscribe for a few months and catch up. The good thing is that Netflix makes it incredibly easy to stop, pause, and restart subscriptions. My “wanted” queue is stored. (You can only do the free month trial once per account.) I don’t own a Wii/PS3/Xbox and rarely stream video from my laptop, but I have noticed improvement in the selection available. How about you?

Do you use Netflix?

• Yes, long-time subscriber (more than a year)
• Yes, recent subscriber (less than a year)
• No, but I have in the past.
• No, never.

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Sources: BusinessInsider, Guardian