Smart Stores: Consumer Monitoring in Exchange for Your Information

At a Walgreen’s cash register the other day a catalina printed out along with my receipt. I got excited, as these are normally for products that I use. However this time the catalina was $4 off on any (1) Stoppain® Pain Relieving Product. Ah—they must have thought I had pain from all of the low-dose [...]

Spend Less Money by Decreasing Your Points of Purchase

Here’s a fact that I haven’t discussed much here: I used to work in market research and marketing. My old bosses would loathe the types of articles I write on Frugal Confessions and surely lay me off again if they had the chance! After all, I am the worst kind of consumer: I have little [...]

Surprising Return Policies

I once knew a serial returner. She would come to work several days a week with several bags of merchandise from several different stores. I asked her about it one day and she smiled, saying that she returns about 60% of everything that she buys. 60 percent. The only thing I could think of was [...]

Paying Cash Makes Purchasing Large Items Hard to Do

Since paying off our non-mortgage debt with a Dave-Suze hybrid approach and vowing to only pay cash for all purchases going forward (we do use credit cards for the reward points and then pay them off completely before the grace period is up), we have had a few big-ticket items come up that have rattled [...]

Cheap is Great, But What Are You Putting Into Your Mouth?

When I went to Walmart the other day to research for their new price matching program, I noticed something that I just couldn’t ignore. Among probably 50 or so different varieties of cheese in the dairy section there was one that was called “Cheddar Melt” that was cheaper than all of the rest. Cheaper is [...]

The Price of Gasoline Alone does Not Paint the Whole Picture

For the last several years gasoline prices have been steadily rising, peaking, and then slowly declining to a new and uncomfortable norm. According to a recent article by CNN Money, American households have spent $368.09 on average on gasoline in April 2011, or 9% of household income (using the median national income). This was with [...]

5 Ways Retailers Try to Trick Us

I am all about transparency in consumerism. I want to know what you are charging me, broken down by item, and why. As long as a retailer can show me this via price tags and advertisements, and it is justified in my mind (including the fact that retailers need to make a profit), then I [...]

Direct Selling: The Potential to Increase Your Bottom Line and Your Cupboards

Visualize this scene: I am sitting with my sister at a Tupperware rally (aka, a revival for consumerism). There are streamers, there is glitter all over the berber carpeting, and there are spray-tan women with microphones. As an early-twenty something still in college I don’t quite have my footing in life, nor do I know [...]

Financial Words in the Dictionary Define Our Culture’s Spending Habits

When we think about trusted sources of the English language, the two dictionaries that come to mind are The Oxford English Dictionary (checkout The Professor and the Madman for a fascinating read on OED history) and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Both of these have been around since the 19th century, and each has a meticulous, almost [...]

Forced Donations: A Nuisance or a Necessity

Charities have taken quite a hit in the last few years. As American’s wallets became more and more pinched, donating to the Salvation Army at Christmas time or to the food bank became a luxury item. What is the result? While alcohol consumption remained largely unchanged throughout the recession, charitable donations decreased by 3.6%. On [...]

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