In the past few weeks, I’ve had to request a larger number of refunds than normal for my food purchases. These refunds fall into two categories: – The price at the register is higher than the price on the shelf, so the store ends up refunding the difference. – The item is damaged in shipping […]

I took a rare trip to a department store last weekend to pick up a few things. As always, I found it exceedingly difficult to locate the desired items, even with a printout from the store’s website in hand. However, that’s sort of unavoidable in stores with large floor plates and multiple floors per department. […]

Whenever possible, I like to buy bulk-size packages of food. My apartment has lots of storage space, so the larger packages save time and money compared to constantly reordering smaller versions. However, I’ve noticed one annoying trend regarding these larger packages. The bigger the package, the less likely it is to be resealable. While smaller […]

The process I use for placing my monthly grocery delivery order is quite simple. First, I print out a receipt showing what I bought last month. Then, I go to the page in the online grocer’s website that lets me reorder any of the items that I’ve bought before. Finally, I fill in the quantities […]

I had family visiting me in the city last weekend, which always means eating out a little more than usual. Our first such excursion was breakfast, which brought me to a diner that I hadn’t eaten at in months. Compared to my previous meal there, two things stood out: – The server left a large […]

I’ve been purchasing the same brand of nonfat yogurt for years. Since the small containers are usually cheaper per ounce than the bulk size, I typically get several dozen of the little containers delivered every month. With so much plastic involved, I always try to wash out the containers and drop them in the recycling […]

Last week, I made several changes to my online banking setup in an effort to streamline and simplify things. For the most part, these changes consisted of finding the appropriate Edit button or link, and then modifying the desired values. However, not every change was quite so straightforward. In a few cases, I didn’t see […]

After working through a series of rather frustrating issues with one of our main phone providers, I received another nasty surprise from telco land. One of our secondary providers sent an email saying that our credit card was declined, and that our account had been suspended as a result of the failed payment. Since I […]

The other day, I found myself on the phone for many hours with one of our telephone providers. We were troubleshooting a rather complex issue, and I had to call back at least a half dozen times before the problem was fixed. At the start of each of these calls, I typically spoke to someone […]

Over the past few months, I’ve had several problems with the recurring orders for a particular food item. First, the “low salt” version that I prefer was no longer available, so I had to switch to the regular one. Then, the product disappeared altogether, forcing me to start from scratch to find a replacement — […]