Waffle

Two more articles that caught my fancy:
A letter from Iceland at the Financial Times online. Everyone on my reading list seems to have been linking to that today. It's a long explanation of the economic city in Iceland.
Iceland is probably the miner's canary for the coming recession in that it'll define the limits of how bad things are going to get, and reach those limits a few months before everyone else. Right now, it's pretty bad, but not riots in the streets-level bad.

Retailers feel Pinch of Returns at the New York Times. What strikes me about this is that consumers still aren't getting it even when they believe they do:

More forgiving policies may be good news for Ms. Kakouris, the real estate agent in Miami. From time to time, pangs of conscience have caused her to regret a purchase before she has even stepped out of the store. “I’ll be on the escalator, and already I’m thinking, ‘I can’t do this,’ ” she said.

Returning such items is a matter of principle, and also a matter of pride, she said. “It’s self-control — that’s a positive thing, isn’t it?” Ms. Kakouris added. “At any rate, I’m clearing off my
guilt.”

Impulse-buying items and then returning it is not self-control. If you can't afford to buy stuff, keep your money in your pocket, instead of shafting the retailer with the extra cost of dealing with the return. Buyer-protection laws are for when an item is defective or you've been pressured into buying it, not for when you want the thrill of shopping without the consequences.

And the practice of "Wardrobing" mentioned in the article? Just don't get me started. (via)

I spent €60 at the market this afternoon, plus €17 at my local organic butcher's, and €6 at the market yesterday during my lunch break (when there were different stalls including an organic bread stall that I didn't discover until after I'd bought bread. I'd have spent much more if my lunch break had been longer) . It's safe to say that my food budget has exploded this week.

I'm not going through an itemized list this time, but I do want to mention that some of these expenses were one-offs. The biggest extra expense was tortilla chips plus four kinds of dip to go with them; the plan is for me to reverse-engineer and then improve on the dip I like the best (which is probably going to be the chilli), so that's €8-10 that I'll only spend once. I also bought enough cheese to last for three weeks, plus fresh cilantro, which I usually do without.
I've located milk! But I didn't buy any as it was €1.30 for half a liter. Locally produced and organic, so probably very good, but the price was one I'd expect in a cafetaria, not in retail. I can technically afford to pay € 2.60 a liter for milk, but only if I still save money overall, which I'm not doing.

Going back to the original purposes of the experiment, I ended up buying a lot of things that weren't whole food staples but prepared foods: melba toast, the dips, chocolate nuts, the tortilla chips which by Michael Pollan's definition are edible, foodlike substances. So the experiment's purpose was defeated entirely and I might as well get those things from the supermarket again. On the plus side, shopping at the market is a lot more fun - you're outdoors, there are bargains to be had and new products to try, and the smells from some of those stalls is just divine. Goat cheese in particular taunts and tempts me whenever I pass it, as do Moritz's olives, sun-dried tomatos and feta.

Experiment over! It would have been fun and interesting to do this for a couple of months; describing your shopping in great detail is the sort of thing that's dull if you do it once, but becomes more interesting if you keep it up until patterns become visible. But the pattern that's showing up already is that I spend more and don't stick to the experiment's purpose, so to protect my wallet, I'm cutting it off here. I'll be splitting my purchases between the outdoors market and the supermarket like a sane person.