Savvy Saving Bytes

Oh boy! Over a week before Halloween and ALREADY the shelves in the 99-Cent store are stuffed with Christmas glitz. Stores roll out their Christmas goodies earlier every year, but this — with Thanksgiving more than a month away — is Crazyville. Or so I think till a little research informs me that 40% of [...]

Most readers get to my blog after fairly mundane Google searches. But some of these information seekers arrive with such peculiar, downright oddball queries, I can’t help but wonder about them. Here are a few of those singular queries (in bold italic, spelling and grammar uncorrected): “Which procedure is less expensive for funeral – creamation [...]

This week two firecrackers were lobbed into my personal food world. The first one came from — say it ain’t so – Zabar’s, a high end Manhattan deli that’s been satisfying my yen for smoked salmon and herring with onions and cream whenever I’ve felt particularly flush. It turned out the lobster salad Zabar’s has [...]

A longer version of this post was published in the early days of this blog when readers were as scarce as frogs flipping up Fifth Avenue. Ever get the feeling too many salespeople consider customer’s questions to be intrusions into their real job – which is to grab our cash at top speed and shove [...]

In the beginning my part time job was enough of a challenge to make it interesting. Recommended by a high school classmate, I had been hired by a local department store to repair damaged costume jewelry. Working in a tiny, windowless, basement space, I nonetheless got a kick out of figuring out how to put [...]

Confession time. Am about to do an about-face* on CVS’s self-service, checkout stations. When I first wrote about their sudden appearance in CVS stores in October, I was not thrilled about taking on the role of cashier and working for free. Nor was I enthusiastic about dealing with cobbled together self-checkout stations that always seemed [...]