Negotiation for a New Car

How do you feel about negotiating prices? I know there must be some people who enjoy haggling, but I am among the many who find it stressful. This applies to all sorts of situations, from buying a cheap bracelet in an Istanbul bazaar to buying an apartment to certain business deals. Now I have discovered that I hate it even when I am not directly involved!

Let me explain. A friend, who I will call Consuelo, is buying a car and I have inadvertently turned into her coach. When she started telling me about her last car purchase, which was her first, we both had to laugh about all the things she'd obviously done wrong. And this was over 10 years ago, when the online resources we have now weren't as extensive. She did research car models via Consumer Reports, and went shopping at a time when dealers would be trying to clear the previous year's models off the lot, but then when she was first offered a price and it seemed kind of low enough, she didn't even try to negotiate further, and then she got bamboozled into paying for some additional options and an extended warranty she didn't need.

I have never bought a car myself-- and as a New York City resident, I probably never will-- but of course I got interested in the topic and offered to use my online Consumer Reports access to help her figure things out better this time around. She already had a specific car in mind so I pulled the pricing info that helps you calculate a reasonable target price to bargain towards. It's not just the dealer invoice price-- you have to factor in incentives and dealer holdbacks to calculate how low the dealer can really go and still make a profit of 1-5%. It's great to have this information, but then you can't help worrying that paying anything over that amount means you are being ripped off.

I gave Consuelo all the numbers and talked through all the sorts of approaches that are recommended when dealing with car sales people. Basically, you want to do all your research in advance, know what you want and what you can be flexible about, and have a target price in mind for the car you want. You should make this clear up front and try to set up a bidding war between multiple dealers who have your desired car on the lot and want to unload it. You want to do as much negotiating as possible over the phone, not in the showroom. You have to go to the showroom to test drive the car, but you should make clear that you are still at the stage of testing different models and aren't there to buy right away. Sounds pretty straightforward, right? Well, it's a lot easier in theory than it is in reality!

I went with Consuelo to a dealership to test drive the car she wanted. We walked in without an appointment and were helped by a nice female salesperson who I'll call Debbie. Debbie sat us down while she made a copy of Consuelo's license and got the car ready. (Meanwhile, who knows what else was going on while we waited those few minutes. They might have pulled a credit report on Consuelo, though they aren't supposed to do that.) Then we went out for a drive. Debbie pointed out some nice things about the car but without any sort of hard sell. Somehow we ended up talking about how female car sales people are becoming more common, and how some female customers prefer to deal with women and some men refuse to. She told us she'd only been selling cars for a few months. When we got back to the showroom, Debbie sat us down and showed us a brochure about the latest model of the car, asked what color Consuelo wanted, etc. She wasn't pushy or high pressure, but she gently drew Consuelo into revealing more about her preferences than she should have. Consuelo said she wanted the previous year's model, in a certain configuration, and Debbie started looking in the inventory system for it. She didn't have the exact one in stock but said she could order it easily, with only a $500 deposit. Consuelo was sitting there biting her lip as if she might just do it, and was only reluctant because she hadn't seen the color she liked best in person. I was the one who had to interject that she could just look around a bit more to see if she could see the car elsewhere, and take Debbie's business card and come back later. In my head I was saying "Snap out of it, Consuelo! You're supposed to be playing hardball here!"

Afterwards, we discussed how things had gone. Consuelo liked Debbie and because the dealership was convenient, she wanted to buy the car there.  No discussion of price had occurred. I felt like she'd gotten off on the wrong foot-- she'd let Debbie establish a feeling of trust, and she was allowing herself to be influenced by factors less important than getting a good price, although I could understand that there might be enough value to those other factors that she'd compromise on price a little for them. So the next step was searching other nearby dealers' websites to see if we could look at the right car in person, and start getting some price quotes. I already figured that if Debbie had to order the car from another dealer, the price would probably include two dealers' profit instead of just one, and that a dealer with the car in stock would be much more incentivized to make a good deal. Consuelo emailed Debbie and asked what her price for the car would be-- pretty much just like that: "Hi Debbie, what would your price be for the car we discussed?" To me, this was her next mistake-- she should have put it all in context, saying that based on her research, she was looking for a price of $X, and if Debbie could give her a good price, she was ready to buy. But having left it open-ended, of course Debbie came back to her offering a price of only a few hundred dollars under the MSRP. Consuelo forwarded the email to me and said, "This seems high."

I decided to help her a bit more proactively, thinking it might also be a good idea if some searching was done under my name rather than hers. I found the car at another dealer not far away and submitted a request for a quote, and also sent Consuelo a link to yet another dealer who had the car so she could request a quote herself. The dealer she contacted gave her a very good price, only a little bit more than the target price from Consumer Reports, and specified that it included the destination charge, which was around $800. I told Consuelo to verify that they would not be tacking on a bunch of other fees CR warns you about, and meanwhile, she went back to Debbie with the lower quote, adn asked if her price had included the destination charge.  Debbie replied that it had-- though I am sure if Consuelo had accepted that price without questioning fees, she would have been told that the destination charge was additional. Debbie did not offer to match the other price, but instead said something cryptic about how she understood that price was important. We weren't sure if she was just saying she couldn't negotiate further or what-- I suspected that she sensed Consuelo wanted to buy the car from her and was not going to give an inch unless she had to. This time, I had to say it out loud: "Consuelo, Debbie is very nice, but she is playing you like a violin. Don't take it personally-- it's her job."

Meanwhile, the other dealership replied that there were no additional fees. It was all sounding good, so Consuelo made an appointment to go in and see the car without asking if any further price reduction was available. The earliest she could get to that dealer was a few days later, and by that time, it turned out the exact car she wanted had been sold and they didn't have another one like it. So much for leverage (especially since Consuelo forgot to ask if that dealer would honor the same price when they offered to order her the same car from somewhere else). Another dealer had a price a little closer to Debbie's, but we were starting to worry that since there had been some big sales over Memorial Day, fewer and fewer examples of the model Consuelo wanted were showing up in the inventory at local dealers. I figured Debbie would be well aware of this, so Consuelo had less and less negotiating power.
Finally, after a couple of phone calls with someone at another dealership who sounded like the stereotypical sleazy car salesman, Consuelo just decided she was sick of the whole thing, and by that point, I really was too! I'd been thinking so much about all these negotiating strategies and trying to help Consuelo get the best possible price, but that seemed to be less and less possible, and the idea that her desired car model would sell out in the meantime was adding a lot of pressure. By this point, we knew she wasn't going to be all that close to the target price CR had fixated us on, so we felt like we were somehow failing at the whole thing and getting screwed. I was trying to be a good adviser and coach, but ended up taking it so personally that I got really anxious on Consuelo's behalf and was having nightmares about car negotiations! Ultimately, Consuelo told me she was just going to write back to Debbie and say she wanted a price $1,000 lower than Debbie's original offer and could she do it or not. I told her to ask for $1,500 lower and that Debbie would then come back to her with the $1,000 lower price-- which was exactly what happened, so Consuelo thanked me for reminding her not to negotiate against herself. The price did end up being a few hundred dollars below invoice, so it wasn't a terrible deal-- it was an average deal, an acceptable deal-- but it was disappointing not to get the very good deal I thought she should aim for. To put this all in perspective, the price range we're talking about between best feasible price and MSRP was about $32,000-$36,000, and Consuelo's paying $34,000-- but even when you're buying a $34,000 car, it's painful to think someone might be cheating you out of $1,000!

Of course agreeing on a price isn't really the end of a car purchase negotiation-- it's just a step along the way. But this post is getting long, so I'll write a sequel soon covering the rest of the process, including negotiating a trade-in allowance and financing. Consuelo hasn't actually gotten the car just yet, so there's plenty that can still go wrong!! And I'm learning a lot from her experiences along the way.

I'd love to learn more from all of you too-- have you bought many cars in your life? what price range? How did you negotiate? Did you find helpful information online? How good a deal did you get?

The $7 Greeting Card

Would you believe it's possible? I just had to buy 3 cards for various occasions, and when I paid, the total was over $15. It's rather hot out today, so my brain was only slowly and foggily digesting this as I watched the cashier look closely at my receipt-- obviously even she couldn't believe it! I'm no longer surprised when cards are $3 or $4, but when I looked at the receipt myself, there it was, a $6.99 birthday card.

But I do feel I need to point out that the card involved a vibrating nun on a mechanical bull, so it was worth every penny.

A $5 Slice of Pizza??

Yep, right here in Brooklyn:

On Avenue J in the Midwood section of Brooklyn, a small cup of coffee costs $1.39. An 18-stick package of gum is $1.49. And at Di Fara Pizza, the price of a plain cheese slice: $5.

Crowds form at the counter at Di Fara and spill onto the sidewalk. They are not an angry mob, but a hungry one. Some order two slices, for $10, and some, like Frank Mancino, a retired electrician from Bath Beach, Brooklyn, whose girth is a statement about his allegiance to pizza in general and Di Fara in particular, order a whole square pie, for $30.

“Worth it,” said Mr. Mancino, 64, between bites on Wednesday afternoon. “It’s like they dug up my grandma and she made the pie.”

Wow. That's some pretty expensive pizza. I have to confess that I find myself in the "I want to try it" group, as opposed to the "that's outrageous, I'd never go there" group. But I sure wouldn't be getting it for lunch every day at that price...

Financial Housekeeping

Over the last couple of weeks, I've made some more efforts to streamline my financial life a bit.
I set up auto credit card payment on my cable internet and local phone bills. For some reason, I hadn't realized this was an option before, and was doing manual e-payments each month from my bank, but I much prefer having everything go on my credit card so I can earn frequent flier miles.

I canceled my long distance telephone service. I know this one will seem like a no-brainer to many of you who have long used their cell phones or Skype, etc., but I was still hanging on! One reason is probably that I had paperless billing. I'd get an email each month and say "Oh, OK, there's the AT&T bill and it's only about $15, no big deal." But when I recently bothered to actually go to the website and see what that $15 had bought me, I found that I'd only made one outgoing long distance call and the rest of the bill was fees and taxes. Minute per minute, that call had become way more expensive than I thought it was, and that was the last straw! I don't like relying on my cell phone for all calls, but I'll just use my Zaptel calling card if I really want to make a call on the landline.

And yes, I know I should probably cancel my landline but I'm just not ready to do that yet. It's another pretty moderate cost and for the time I spend making local calls, it is worthwhile, as I'd have to upgrade my cell minutes if I didn't have the landline. But the annoying thing was that a few months ago, I'd finally had to replace an answering machine I had since college. I bought a phone with a digital answering machine built in, for about $30. Unfortunately, this piece of shit stopped working after a few months and recorded nothing but static. Emails to the manufacturer went unanswered and I'd been procrastinating about buying a new one. Then I started to think about how many people call me on my cell phone anyway, since I'm often not home. A lightbulb went off in my head: I ordered call forwarding service. Yes, this actually costs me about $4.00 a month, but now if I don't pick up, my calls go to my cell phone voicemail, so no answering machine needed, and it's cheaper than using Verizon's voicemail service. And though I could use Google Voice, that would mean telling everyone I had a new number-- this way, I don't have to change the phone number I've used for years and my calls will find me wherever I am. A few dollars spent for a convenience is sometimes worth it.

It's good to take a few minutes to stop and think about these little things. And it goes to show that even someone as financially anal as me can easily miss small money leaks if she doesn't pay close attention to every single bill!

Money at the Deli

I never seem to tire of the weird money-related things that happen in delis. Yesterday when I was getting my lunch, the woman in front of me was complaining about the prices at the deli. She said to the cashier "I know it's not you, it's the owner, but your prices are ridiculous!" He just laughed and rattled off a response that included "shukran" (thank you in Arabic), "shalom" (peace in Hebrew) and "adios" (goodbye in Spanish). Typical New York dialogue!

Then the guy behind me asked for a pack of Camel Lights, and the cashier told him it would be $11. The customer didn't bat an eye, so I guess he's used to it, but no one else in line seemed to be! Last I'd heard, cigarettes were still under $10, so my jaw dropped, and someone further back in line said "ELEVEN DOLLARS! HOLY SH*T!" The cashier was laughing again, and this time his response, all in English, was "yeah, people come in, they complain, five dollars too much for a sandwich, but cigarettes eleven dollars, they don't care!"

For $4.60, I got a tuna sandwich and a little entertainment...

New Postage Rates Go Into Effect May 11

In case you're like me and keep losing track of when the heck this is supposed to happen, and what the price of a stamp is nowadays: as of May 11th, the price of a letter stamp will go up to 44 cents. Stock up on your 42 cent Forever Stamps while you still can! (USPS new price list here.)

Since I'm still using up my 39 cent stamps, that's a lot more of the envelope I'll need to cover with penny stamps... thank goodness they're self-adhesive!

I'm the Next Contestant on The Price is Right!

Not really, though I'd get a kick out of meeting Drew Carey! But I was thinking about this today: how good a sense do you have of what things cost? And I mean the little things in life, that you might buy occasionally if not every day.

Example: dental floss. I just saw my favorite kind at Duane Reade. (Glide Comfort Plus Mint) They don't always have it in stock, so I grabbed 3 packs. Then I noticed that it was $4.99 each. That seemed weird to me-- I have no idea how much I've paid in the past, but if you'd asked me how much a pack of dental floss cost, I'd have guessed maybe $2.99. I haven't bought it in a few months, but I've bought it many times, and always at Duane Reade, so why was my guess off by 40%???

In trying to think of other things like this, I'm sure there are many household items for which I have no idea how much I'd pay-- cleaning products, sponges, a pound of sugar. And for bigger things like a lawnmower or a car or a set of skis, I'd be totally clueless. If I was a contestant on The Price is Right, I'd probably lose! How would you do?

People Want Cheap Stuff

Boy, have we become a price-conscious country. More people are shopping at Wal-Mart. Inexpensive paperback books are outselling hardcovers by ever wider margins. And L. L. Bean is highlighting a whole range of items that are still the same price they were in 1995:


Enjoy it while it lasts!

Price Points

One of the funny things about publishing is that you can sometimes find a roomful of people all spending an awful lot of time discussing something that probably isn't all that important, like "Maybe the piece of cake on the cover should be bigger," or "Should the category be current events slash business? Or business slash current events?" One of these issues can be book prices.

It's not that book prices are never important-- when the big chains suddenly mark books down by 50% or more, their sales do pick up. And if you're trying to launch a new novelist, it can make a difference if the book is a $14 paperback compared to the $25 or $26 a well-known bestselling author can command for a new hardcover. Of course most people who are buying that bestselling author's hardcover are actually buying it at chain stores or warehouse clubs that mark it down anywhere between 20-50% off the cover price.

But the other day, I found myself in a conversation about prices that verged on the absurd. Have you ever noticed how some books' prices end in 95 cents, some in 99 cents, and some are in full dollars? Here are a few comments from that conversation:

I hate .95 and .99 pricing. As a consumer, I feel like they just think I'm stupid, like, duh, I'm really going to think 19.95 is dramatically less than $20.00 and it will affect whether I buy something?

.99 prices seem weird to me. I mean, a penny isn't that big a savings. But .95 seems like you're actually getting something.

I don't know why, but I am totally susceptible to that in stores-- for some reason, $14.95 does kind of seem more attractive than $15.00. But as a publisher, I'd rather keep that extra 5 cents!

To me the whole debate just seems silly. Pennies should be abolished, and nickels don't even seem all that useful either. I'm just glad we sell books and not gas, where you get into that nine tenths of a cent thing... but here's another quote from that conversation:

Why do we have "price points," anyway? Why are books never $15.39? Or $42.95? In the lower range, you get things priced at $20, $21, $21.95, $22.00, $22.50... but after a while, there are some prices you just never use! If you want to price a book at $32.95, someone will say that's a weird price point and why don't we either make it $29.95 or $35.00!

Have you ever noticed that things don't tend to have those weird price points? I actually went to a strange little shop in Park Slope years ago that prided itself on giving things weird prices like $6.74, or $102.66, just for the heck of it. Sometimes they'd even have multiples of the same object with different prices-- one would be $11.33 and another on the shelf would be $13.20. But that was a place run by the McSweeney's people that was deliberately poking fun at the whole concept of stores and trying to be weird...
What do you think about even dollars vs. those .95 or .99 prices? Does the extra penny or nickel really make it seem more expensive?

Free Printer... for $60

Don't you love those free gifts that end up costing you money? I was visiting my parents again this past weekend and continued some of my clean-up and organizing efforts for my dad (who is doing ok with his treatments so far). One thing he'd wanted me to do was set up a new printer he'd bought.
My dad is such a weird collector-- he gets obsessed with certain things. (Like I should talk, given what I just wrote about pens.) A few years ago, he bought his first printer, a very nifty combination printer/fax/scanner which was amazingly cheap. Then a year or two ago, he bought a new printer. I don't think the first one was broken-- I think he must have just read an article in Consumer Reports recommending the newer model, or the prices on printers had gotten even more incredibly cheap and he thought he should stock up, or something.
Anyway, he set up the new printer, but almost immediately, it didn't work quite right-- the black ink never printed properly, only the colors. On one of my visits before he got sick I tried to play around with it, but I couldn't figure out what was wrong. Dad procrastinated about returning it and eventually bought a new printer, which he hadn't gotten around to setting up when he got sick. I was still using the malfunctioning one when I was trying to set up his budget and print out information about wills, etc. My work-around was to make the font color on everything purple rather than black!
On this latest visit, I finally set up the newest printer for him. The other two old printers were still sitting there waiting to be disposed of and it occurred to me that although I don't need a printer at home, I could use a scanner, and that part of the printer seemed to work fine. So I asked him if I could have the old printer-- you'd think I wouldn't bother to ask, since it would just be thrown away, but my dad tends not to throw anything away, especially out of date electronics. He still has a dusty old reel-to-reel tape deck in the basement.
Anyway, he agreed and I brought the printer home. In order to set it up, I knew I would have to buy a printer cable. I then began to wonder if the printing function really was broken, or if perhaps it just was a faulty ink cartridge or low memory on my dad's very old laptop that was causing the problem. And I found myself deciding that yes, after all, it might be rather nice to have a printer at home. So I went to Staples and bought the printer cables and a set of ink cartridges. Total cost? About $60. I was a little surprised when I heard the total, but it wasn't until later that I thought to look at the prices of brand new printers:


The one at the bottom is the equivalent model. !$%!&$

Little Things, Little Things...

Let's hope the money I've saved by eating stale crackers for lunch will pay for my latest little splurge: some nice pens. I've spent about $20 in the past month on 4 new pens, all after stumbling on a blog called The Pen Addict. If you have the least inclination to care about what kind of pen you use, DO NOT CLICK ON THAT LINK! You will be sucked in. You will want to buy new pens.

I generally feel like pens are a thing that should not be bought. Lots of free ones are given away, and if you work in an office, so much of your use of pens is probably for work purposes anyway that you'll just use the ones you get there for free. But I hate crappy pens. When my office stopped stocking the kind I like best, I hoarded the ones I had, and at one point I even ordered a way overpriced box of them online because I was afraid they weren't being made any more. I still have a few of those left and continue to use them happily.

But in the meantime, I've been trying to organize my life better by keeping lots of notes and to-do lists in one of my beloved Moleskine notebooks. In the past, I've kept lots of lists in my PDA, and there are advantages to the electronic method, but I also really like the immediacy of writing things in a notebook. I've posted about my notebook obsession before, and since increasing my usage of notebooks lately, I've been searching for cheaper ways to buy them. There are plenty of blogs that discuss Moleskines, and one of the frequent themes is how different pens work on Moleskine paper. My usual pens work okay in Moleskines, but not perfectly. Or at least they seemed much less perfect after reading other people's opinions about what pens are closer to perfect via sites like Pen Addict!

Also, I wanted to try using multiple colors in my notebook to try to differentiate different projects. I thought it would be handy to have one of those multiple 4-in-1 pens like Bic makes, but I only use rollerball pens, not regular ballpoints, and a rollerball multi-pen seemed impossible to find... until I visited JetPens.com, where I bought a nifty rollerball featuring black ink, red ink, and a mechanical pencil all in one. It was $6, which seems like a lot for a fairly basic plastic pen. (Fortunately, though I've used fountain pens in the past, they hold no attraction for me now, as you could easily spend a lot more than $6 on one of those!) The trouble with buying pens online is that you can't be sure they'll feel the way you want them to, and that you're tacking on shipping charges that can seem quite high relative to the price of the item itself. But I was so happy with the pens I ordered that I'll probably end up ordering some more... which may mean I'll have to start eating stale crackers for dinner too!

What Things Cost in New York: 40 Years Ago and Today

Last week, New York Magazine celebrated their 40th anniversary. My favorite feature in the magazine was a page comparing prices of some quintessential New York items, from 1968 when the magazine was founded to today. What's interesting is that some things have gone up less than overall inflation, while others have increased far more than that.
By my calculations, the effect of inflation makes something cost 6 times more today than it did in 1968. I took New York magazine's prices and figured out the increase factor and sorted them below-- those in green are a relative bargain today, as they have gone up less than the rate of inflation. Those in red have gone up more than the rate of inflation. Kind of gives you a new perspective on what's expensive and what's a bargain!

	Increase Factor	Price Today
Movie Ticket	3.2	$12.00
1lb Zabar's Nova Scotia Smoked Salmon	3.4	$34.00
Lombardi's Large Cheese Pizza	4.3	$19.50
Serendipity Frozen Hot Chocolate	4.8	$8.50
Burger at 21 Club	6	$30.00
Village Vanguard Cover Charge	7.1	$25.00
Taxi fare for 2.5-mile Ride	7.5	$11.14
Knish at Yonah Schimmel	8.6	$3.00
Subway Fare	10	$2.00
Financial District Shoe Shine	12	$3.00
Martini at Algonquin Hotel	14.4	$18.00
New York Times	15	$1.50
MOMA Admission	16	$20.00
NYU Undergrad Tuition	17.8	$37,372.00
Broadway Show Ticket	18.2	$113.18
Triborough Bridge Toll	20	$5.00
Pack of Marlboros	25.7	$9.00
1 Ounce Marijuana	26.6	$400.00
Room at Waldorf-Astoria	30.3	$559.00
Box Seat at Yankee Stadium	62.5	$250.00

Tipping Etiquette at the Hair Salon

For years, I've been getting my hair cut by a woman who worked out of her own home salon. She isn't cheap, but she's only raised her prices twice, I think, in the almost 10 years I've been going there. Recently, she's had a lot going on in her life and she had to give up the space she'd been renting, and is now working out of a regular salon space owned by someone else.

So here's the thing: all those years, I've never tipped her. I had always heard that it was customary to tip only employees in a salon, not the salon owner. I sometimes wondered about it when I'd pay her, but she never said anything, and I think the friend who originally referred me to her had said she never tipped either, so I tried not to worry too much about it.

Today was my first visit to the new salon location. My hair stylist had said she was moving to this place to cut the overhead costs of her business and that everything else about how she operated would remain unchanged: she would book her own appointments, do her own shampooing, accept payments in exactly the way she'd always done. So part of me thought, ok, her costs are lower now so it should still be okay that I don't tip, right? But I felt weird about it.

After she cut my hair (which as always looks faaahbulous) there came the moment when I handed her the cash, and I had to do it: I leaned closer and said "Can I ask you an awkward question? Do people tip you?" She said that some did, so I immediately said "Ok then, keep the change. I don't want to be one of the people who don't." I told her that I'd not done it before because she worked on her own but that I had wanted to ask now that I knew she had some extra financial stresses in her life, etc., and she thanked me.

My haircut cost $90, and I told her to keep the change from $100, which seemed like the easiest thing to do, and I guess a 10% tip is okay under the circumstances. (Most people seem to think it's appropriate to tip 15-20% to the person who styles and colors your hair, and a few dollars to the person who shampoos you.) I do often think that I budget rather a lot to spend on my hair, so I'm not thrilled to be paying extra, but at least I won't feel so awkward about the tipping question any more! Paying $10 every 5 or 6 weeks to lessen social anxiety is probably worth it!

Notebook Inflation?

My post "On Keeping a Lot of Notebooks" brought a lot of fellow Moleskine fans out of the woodwork, and also led me to some interesting blogs about notebooks. The unfortunate effect of this is that my old notebook lust has been kind of reawakened and I keep finding myself wanting to buy new ones now! I have a hardcover Moleskine and a softcover Moleskine currently going, as well as another little sketchbook that I keep wanting to start, but it's so pristine and gorgeous, I almost can't bear to put a mark in it. I'd like to make each page of it into some beautiful little drawing but I know I'll end up doing something that doesn't turn out right and looks ugly, and then I'll feel like I've spoiled it. So this makes me want to have an identical brand new sketchbook still in the wrapper so I can try again!

So, since I was just passing by anyway(!), I went back into the store where I most recently bought some notebooks. They seemed to have sold out of the sketchbook I wanted. And I was appalled to discover that they'd raised the price on their Moleskines from $12 to $15! That seemed like quite a hike given that I'd only been in there a few weeks ago. I also noticed that they seemed to have redecorated and rearranged the whole store, and thought "well, gee, maybe this renovation has cost them a lot of money and they need to raise prices... but damn, these things are going up in price even faster than gas is!" I kept puzzling over it when I got back to my office, when I finally realized that I was actually confusing two very similar stationery stores that happen to be right near each other! Whoops! They may be $15 at Store A but I'm sure Store B still has the $12 price. (And of course Amazon has them for even less.)

So there's a good tip for you when it comes to getting the best price: first make sure you're in the right store!!

On Keeping a Lot of Notebooks

With apologies to Joan Didion...

Many readers will know that I am a die-hard user of Palm OS PDAs. I've probably spent between $5,000-6,000 on assorted devices, software and accessories over the past 10 years or so, (some of which was later recouped by selling old Palms on ebay) and I feel like most if not all of that money was pretty much worthwhile. I love to carry around lots of information, and I am now so addicted to electronic reminders that I find it impossible to remember tasks and meetings without little beepers going off.

But despite my adoration of electronic gadgetry, I am also a notebook person. My infatuation with notebooks started when I was a child: a family member would give me the little pocket sized diaries that she received each year as a member of the Harvard Coop. They were great little notebooks, with a week at a view, and lots of extra pages with space for addresses, measurement conversions, lists of holidays, etc. I would carry one of these with me everywhere, writing down whatever little things I could think of to write. (Since I was, after all, a kid, I was often frustrated at my lack of important things to write down-- I didn't go to any meetings, I didn't have many expenses to track, and spying on the neighbors didn't really result in clues to any mysteries that I might be required to solve.)

Beyond those little diaries, I've probably spent thousands of dollars on hundreds of notebooks over the years, from little wire-bound notebooks to clothbound sketchbooks to expensive leather Filofaxes. When I moved almost two years ago, I packed at least 3 or 4 shoeboxes full of small notebooks in varying degrees of jotted-ness. I just loved notebooks so much I would often want a new one just for the feel of it, whether or not I really needed any more space to write things down. I was always looking for one that would be a little closer to being THE PERFECT NOTEBOOK, my definition of which shifted over time. When I got into the Filofax stage of the addiction, it got much more expensive, and I bought a few things I really shouldn't have spent so much money on. I was seriously addicted.

When my obsession with information-carrying 3" x 5" objects morphed from paper to electronics, I kind of took a break from buying notebooks. But I still liked to keep a journal, and that is something I can't do in a PDA. For at least the last 5 years or so, the only notebooks I've used for this purpose are Moleskines. The pocket sketchbook became my notebook of choice-- it's got nice heavy unlined paper, good for writing and drawing, but also even for the occasional watercolor painting. I have about 12 of these notebooks, full of all sorts of things: memories, musings, lists, numbers, sketches of Venice and floorplans of apartments. I also have 3 of these notebooks that are brand new and still in the wrapper: spares, since I don't like the idea of running out.


I had to go to a stationery store a couple of weeks ago to find a gift for someone, and for some reason, I found my old notebook lust re-awakening. I bought a Moleskine-ish sketchbook that I thought would be good for drawings-- the paper is rougher than the Moleskine, and I liked the thicker, bulkier feel. But of course I still gazed at the Moleskine display too, and discovered a new kind of Moleskine that I'd never seen before: the soft cover Moleskine, with graph paper inside. It looked nice, it felt nice, it smelled nice: I had to have it. And the minute I took it home and started writing in it, I wanted another one with plain unlined paper too.

The store I'd been to didn't have any soft cover ones with unlined paper. I went into a few more stationery stores who didn't have that kind either. In the process I noticed that different stores charge very different prices for Moleskines. The $12 I just paid for a pocket size Moleskine seems to be about the minimum retail price, but places like Kate's Paperie on 57th street charge up to $15.
Then I looked on Amazon, where the prices vary quite a bit-- sometimes they are the standard $12 retail, some models are discounted 20% or so, and of course you get the other "Used & New" sellers sometimes offering prices as low as $3 or 4 plus shipping. I also found a site called Moleskines.com which offers lower prices and discounts for buying in bulk. The thought of having a dozen pristine Moleskines delivered to my doorstep is disturbingly pleasant.

What can I say... for people like me, Moleskines seem to be one of those things where any sense of financial reason just flies out the window. And I'm not alone-- throughout this post, the word Moleskine links to different sites where these notebooks are artfully used and appreciated, but I particularly enjoyed this writer's summation, at the Cranking Widgets blog:

So, since we’re neat, organized people - here’s a list of what Moleskine’s really are:

1. Paper Notebooks - This is first and foremost. At the end of the day, when all is said and done, these things are just pads of paper. You write things in them just like you would a $.59 spiral-bound notebook from the drugstore or on the back of a cocktail napkin.
2. Expensive - A single large (5.5″ x 8.5″) Moleskine notebook will set you back anywhere from $15-$20, depending on where you buy it. If you were to tell me 5 years ago that one day I would drop that kind of cheddar on a book of blank pages, I would’ve laughed in your face. But, i did it...

I should also point out here, and I feel like a commenter may have mentioned it in the past, that Moleskines can help with expense tracking if you want to do it manually. The pocket on the inside back cover is a great place to store receipts!

Do we have any other Moleskine fans in the peanut gallery?

Wine & Money

An article in today's Dining section of the Times talks about whether enjoyment of wine is affected by outside factors such as the circumstances in which you drink it, or knowing how much it cost.

The researchers scanned the brains of 21 volunteer wine novices as they administered tiny tastes of wine, measuring sensations in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, the part of the brain where flavor responses apparently register. The subjects were told only the price of the wines. Without their knowledge, they tasted one wine twice, and were given two different prices for that wine. Invariably they preferred the one they thought was more expensive.

“Forget those blurbs about bouquets, body and berries,” one newspaper account crowed. “A meticulous new study found that the more people think a wine cost, the more they like it. And the less they think it cost, the less they like it.”

Big surprise. Sommeliers all over know that the hardest wine to sell in a restaurant is the cheapest bottle on the list. “Yeah, clients don’t want to be embarrassed in front of a date, so they don’t order the cheapest wines,” said Fred Dexheimer, the wine director of the BLT restaurant group. The fact is, the correlation between price and quality is so powerful that it affects not just our perception of wine but of all consumer goods.

Studies like this seem to come up every so often, so this is no big surprise. But what these studies have never taken into account, as far as I know, is the subjects' attitudes towards money. I think that a frugal-minded personal finance blogger might be more likely to enjoy a cheap wine just because it's cheap. I know I can be this way-- sometimes I probably like things just because I am so happy I got a bargain when buying them. Someone who really values saving money might not enjoy an expensive wine just because they want to believe that a cheap one is just as good.
On the other hand, someone who is very focused on attaining wealth and luxury goods and projecting a certain image of their financial status might be more likely to enjoy an expensive wine, because they believe expensive things should be better, and because they want to feel like their hard-earned money is buying them the kind of rewards they deserve. After all, if expensive things aren't better, there's no value to being rich, right?

Obviously, the answer is for some researchers to set up a study comparing the wine tastes of personal finance bloggers to those of the rest of the population at large. I hereby volunteer to be your first guinea pig!

Headache.

I hate getting headaches. I get bad ones sometimes and they drive me crazy! Nothing seems to work other than going to bed with an icepack, and even that doesn't always help. For some reason, several people, including my doctor, have suggested I try using Excedrin. This morning I was a bit desperate so I went to the local pharmacy to find some.
For $4.27, I could buy a 24-pill jar of Excedrin Migraine. For $4.29, I could buy a 24-pill jar of Extra Strength Excedrin. They actually have the exact same ingredients: 250 mg of Acetaminophen, 250 mg of aspirin, and 65 mg of caffeine. So I decided to buy the migraine version and save 2 cents. And I did this while knowing full well that I already have generic acetaminophen at home, as well as coffee, and I could easily buy some cheap generic aspirin to construct for myself the exact same combination of active ingredients for less money.
But like I said, headaches drive me crazy. The Excedrin hasn't helped. Groan.

Saving on Software

Since buying my new Mac, I'd been wondering what to do about my lack of Word and Excel programs on it. I could use the basic TextEdit program for minor bits of writing, but I don't need to do that very often. What I really wanted was to be able to play with complicated financial spreadsheets at home! It's been such a long time since I've been able to easily do that. On my old Mac, I had to run the OS9/Classic operating system to use Excel, which was a nuisance so I never did it. I ended up doing all my spreadsheets at work. Which I really didn't have time for unless I stayed late and blew off the gym-- not good.

So with the new Mac, I wondered what to do. First thing was to call my friend Mortimer, who I thought might have an extra copy of Microsoft Office. I am not advocating software piracy here, but it sometimes comes with multiple user licenses and I liked the idea of "free!" But Mortimer wasn't able to help me.
Next I considered buying Microsoft Office. It's about $150 for the Home/Student edition, which should do more than enough for someone like me. But the customer comments on Amazon made it sound kind of buggy, so I stopped just short of hitting the "buy now" button.
Then I wondered about Apple's iWork-- that was only $79, but it sounded like I could potentially run into some compatibility problems if I was emailing files to PC users.
Some of these "problems" might have been the misguided rants of crazy Amazon customers, but it was enough to make me hesitate about spending so much money. I tried looking on some Mac forum elsewhere, I don't even remember which one, and noticed a mention of a program called NeoOffice. It's an open source, volunteer-developed Office-type program. They ask that you make a donation before downloading it, but it can be as little as $5. I decided to give it a shot.
After playing around with it a little, I am totally impressed and can't believe it's basically free. If you're used to Word and Excel and Powerpoint, you might find a few things slightly different, but it's 90% identical, and seems to work really well. Here's a highly sophisticated chart I was working on to illustrate the price differential:

I'm looking forward to posting a lot more financial charts and spreadsheets now! Thank you NeoOffice!

A Penny for a Smile: Shopping at the 99 Cent Store

I did a little shopping with a friend this past weekend. One of our exciting destinations was a 99 cent store in my neighborhood. I yanked my friend across the street so we could go in, because in a pile outside the store, I had seen a little plastic table I wanted for my balcony. I had looked at the same ones last summer but they sold out before I could go back and buy one, so this time I didn't want to miss it!
My friend asked why I wanted to go into the store, which at first I interpreted as a sign of scorn, as in "why do you want to buy anything in that dump?" It turned out she just wanted to know what I was planning to buy, and was actually kind of excited because she loves 99 cent stores. "You never know what kind of things you might find," she said.
I bought my little table, which was only $5.99, as well as a wastebasket, and a package of t-shirts. Total damage about $21. My friend bought some dishwashing liquid and a chapstick, totaling $4.71. When she went to pay, the cashier said "I don't need the penny." She didn't hear him correctly as she was fishing around in her wallet for the change and he repeated it, saying "No penny, you don't have to give me the penny." She finally realized what he was saying and jokingly replied "Oh, you don't want my penny? My penny isn't good enough for you?" The cashier started laughing and joking back at her, and was still giggling when we left, which amazed me, because I have been in there many times and have never seen him crack a smile-- I thought he was one of these grumpy old guys who would never smile at anyone, let alone laugh.

After all that, we ended up going to dinner in a different neighborhood of Brooklyn. Cobble Hill is a lot more upscale than where I live, but it still has its un-gentrified remnants, one of which was another 99 cent store. As we passed, my friend said "Oh look, they have your little table!" I went over to look, certain that they'd be charging some outrageous price for it, in effect a yuppie tax that I'd be avoiding by shopping in my own grungy neighborhood. The Cobble Hill price for the table turned out to be $4.99, $1 less than I paid in Sunset Park.

I guess the moral of this story, if there is one, is that preconceived notions can be toppled by even the smallest amounts of money!

Customized, at a Cost

Ok, yesterday's post was indeed an April Fool's joke: much as I'd like my blog to make more money, I don't plan on getting into the merchandise business. But to those of you who are disappointed by that, I'll just point out that the 3 items I mentioned are all things that can really be bought online!

You can go to the Converse website and create your own customized shoes, with a variety of materials and colors. You select your options, they're displayed on screen, and then 2-4 weeks after you order, your unique Chucks arrive! I am seriously tempted to get a pair of suede ones, though perhaps not quite in the colors I displayed below. Actually, what's dangerous is that when you play around on the website, you have too much choice! I came up with about a dozen color combinations I could imagine wearing! But $75 is kind of a lot of money for such simple shoes. (The regular canvas ones tend to retail for $42 or less. Even that seems like a lot when I remember buying my first pair at an Army/Navy store for about $16, back when I was in high school and they were considered kind of punk!) It's still cheap compared to many other sneakers, though, and I do like the idea of having a pair that looks exactly the way I want them to. Do you think it's worth the money?

How about the Kleenex? Again, you really can buy these at the Kleenex website. I know some people can't stand to have their decor thrown off by a clashing Kleenex box. When my mother was visiting last year and wanted to help me decorate, a tissue box cover was one of the first things she wanted to buy for me. My own opinion was that it was the last thing I needed! It's not like looks don't matter to me-- they do. But I'm just not extreme enough about it to want to spend $15 or more on a tissue box cover, and I really don't see why anyone would want to pay $5 for a customized Kleenex box that is totally disposable. Sure it makes a fun wedding favor, but for everyday use, I would never spend the money. Even the regular oval boxes they have in the store come at a big markup compared to the usual ugly square and rectangular boxes, so I won't buy them, despite their cooler looks.

In any case, it's fascinating that we now have the technology to produce such things cheaply enough for them to be a mass-market item. It used to be that customization was only for things like tailor-made suits and shirts that were going to be really expensive anyway. And to me, something like a suit or shoes being custom-made is more worthwhile anyway-- if I made a bit more money, I would much rather spend the big bucks on a few perfect-fitting items of clothing than on off-the-rack stuff.

What's your opinion? Do you think customized items like this are worth the money? Have you ever purchased this type of item?