Mighty Bargain Hunter

I don’t have any problem hanging up on charities

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JLP at All Financial Matters asked his readers how they handle cold calls from charities. Is there a way to handle these kinds of calls gracefully when there’s no interest in giving to the charity? JLP asks: “How do you say no to legitimate calls for help without feeling guilty?”

I’m not anti-charity and we do support several, and we give generously to our church. But at the same time, I have no problem just hanging up without a word as soon as I realize it’s a charity. Absolutely none whatsoever. That sounds cold — and for all I know it might be — but here are the three main reasons:

• The charities don’t take the hint. You’d think after hanging up on them two dozen times that it would be pretty clear that I don’t want to donate. Nope. This doesn’t enter the equation because …
• The charities don’t have to take the hint. Even if I tell them I don’t ever want to give and that they’re wasting their time calling me, charities are exempt from the laws governing the National Do Not Call Registry. I cannot stop them from calling. From the Business FAQ page on DoNotCall.org:

The National Do Not Call Registry does not limit calls by political organizations, charities, or telephone surveyors.

• Charities will continue to ask for money. Most charities worth supporting have legitimate reasons to ask for money, but when’s the last time you heard a fundraising drive end early because they raised enough money? The charities that we support always, always continue to offer us opportunities to give more.

The few charities that call us at home again and again — the “usual suspects” — are ones that we’ve never had any interest in supporting. In most cases the charities we support don’t call us. That’s why I don’t feel the slightest twinge of guilt hanging up on the ones who do. The calling rules are set up in their favor, but I can still control the length of the call.

Posted in Charitable Giving | 2 Comments »

We aren’t really sorry for any inconvenience this might cause

“We’re sorry for any inconvenience this might cause.”

When a business or website says this, does it sometimes hit you as being empty and more than a little ingenuine? Especially when the motive behind the “inconveniencing” actions is clear?

I’ve been using Iwon for a news portal and stock tracker for the past few years. The same company runs an ad-free version called MyWay but I haven’t bothered to overcome the small inertia to move things over there.

Anyway, at the end of this month, they’ll be discontinuing the portfolio feature:

We are sorry. As of June 1st, Iwon will no longer be supporting the Portfolio feature. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Before I get called out for ragging on free stuff and lacking class and all of that, I’m not ragging on anything about their service. It has nothing to do with what they provide, which is quite a bit, and I visit it almost every weekday, and will continue to do so. And it was actually nice of them to warn me that the portfolio was going away. If they had just said that they’re not going to support the service after June 1st — period — I’d be fine with that.

But it bugs me when businesses apologize for my inconvenience when it’s clear that it’s nothing more than a business move.

Iwon is advertiser-supported. The services it provides cost them money, as do the prizes it gives out, so the only way they can stay in business is to bring in more in advertising fees and affiliate commissions than they’re shelling out for the services. My guess is that this portfolio feature either wasn’t drawing the traffic like it used to, or it became too costly for them. That’s why they’re canceling it. Why else would they cancel it after providing it for a few years? They’re not really sorry for canceling the service; they’re just letting someone else provide it and bear the costs while they concentrate on more profitable areas for them.

On the other side, some businesses will change the services with their customers, inform the customers, and that’s it. My dentist did this last year. She ceased being a preferred provider for the network my insurance supported, and she said that there would be more burden on me to fight for my money if the insurance company decided not to honor a claim. I wasn’t really warm and fuzzy at that prospect, but I respect the business decision she made because she didn’t try to sugar-coat it, and she didn’t apologize for it. (Not that she’d recommend sugar-coating anything. She is a dentist, after all.)

I’m not saying that it’s always a bad idea to apologize. If I’m running a web site that people depend on (and pay for) and things go down because of some screw-up on my part, then sure, I should apologize. But I see businesses apologizing for their business decisions as a cheap way to soften the blow to the customers, and that rubs me the wrong way. It seems better to just make the changes without apology and possibly explain why to people who ask.

Posted in Commentary | 2 Comments »

Amazon keeps impressing us with its food selection

We’ve come to enjoy Amazon Prime. (For those not familiar, Amazon Prime is all-you-can-eat 2-day shipping for $79 per year. Over a million items on Amazon qualify for Amazon Prime.)

We’ve mentioned this before but our daughter has a number of food allergies that make some of her staple foods pretty expensive. Ukrop’s is kind to us and lets us buy soy milk several cases at a time, and at a discount to boot. Some of our daughter’s foods are available, and competitively priced, on Amazon if we subsidize the shipping by buying from them regularly and subscribe to Prime.

The latest bonanza we found was our daughter’s “non-itchy” lollipops: YummyEarth Organic Wet-Face Watermelon Lollipops. (”Non-itchy” means that she can eat them.) We had been buying bags less than 3 ounces for $2.29 each. These had maybe three of the watermelon lollipops in them. Now we can get four pounds of the lollipops for $20, with two-day shipping to our door included, and they’re all the flavor she likes!

Granted, now we have about a three-year supply of them, but even if she gets sick of them after a pound or so, we’re still ahead. Two gross for $20 runs circles around three or four for $2.29, don’t you agree?

AHA! You might have caught that I didn’t take the cost of Amazon Prime into account, and you’re right. But — and this surprised me — we can apply the entire cost of one year of Amazon Prime to this purchase, and the lollipops are still cheaper than buying enough bags in the store to get a comparable number of her favorites. Say we paid the entire $79 for shipping these lollipops. So now we’ve effectively paid $99 for 288 lollipops. That’s under 35 cents each. Three or four out of a $2.29 bag is over 50 cents each. The math is pretty clear in favor of Amazon here.

Or Traverse Bay Dried Cherries. Four pounds for $26.57, or $6.64 per pound, again with two-day shipping to our door included. Compare this with 5.5 ounces for $3.99 in the store, or $11.66 per pound.

We’re really liking Amazon’s food selection. Foods that would be pretty expensive, but ones that give our daughter some semblance of a normal diet, are a fair bit less expensive for us on Amazon with Prime.

Posted in Shopping | 3 Comments »

Using money as a reward for good behavior

Our three-year-old daughter is a very smart, articulate, generally considerate, always cute three-year-old. With her articulateness also comes backtalk, sometimes incessant talking and demanding of attention, and vocal displeasure when the winds aren’t blowing her way.

Our current modes of discipline only seem to have limited effect, so my wife and I were talking about what to do. We thought about taking away things that we knew she liked to play with, longer time-outs, etc.

Another thought was to give her five cents at the start of the day with the intention that she loses one cent each time she talks back, does something that she knows she’s not supposed to do, etc. (Not unlike Yosemite Sam.) This wasn’t a bad idea but I didn’t think that my daughter would get the point. It seemed a little bit complicated for a three year old, and a bit like a bribe, as I’ll explain.

My mother-in-law tried something similar with an older child when she visited the child and her mother. The child, who wasn’t really well-behaved at all, received ten half-dollars. Each time there was backtalk he was to lose one. This worked out pretty well, actually. He only lost one the whole day, and my mother-in-law said that he was more testing her to see whether she’d actually take one away or not. I think it worked because (a) half-dollars are unusual enough that they’re fun to play with, (b) it’s a fair bit of money for a child, (c) how much he kept was completely within his control, and (d) he had positive reinforcement right in his hand as a reminder.

I’m not sure I’d go about it quite this way. It did seem to have its good points but I’d prefer to reward after the good behavior. That’s more what life is like: you earn things, whether it’s good credit, a college degree, or a paycheck. Giving a child who’s known to misbehave money at the start of the day smells a bit like a bribe, even if the money can be taken back.

What do you think?

Posted in Personal Finance | 6 Comments »