Eschewing Black Friday, embracing Small Business Saturday
I hope everyone had a great holiday weekend (well, those in the States, anyway — I hope everyone else had a great ordinary weekend). We had an awesome dinner, if I do say so myself. I am almost done with the cost calculations I promised; I just need to get a few prices from Costco for some pantry staples that I already had on hand.
I did not for a moment consider doing any sort of shopping on Black Friday. Even before my recent focus shift towards non-consumption, when my thrifty streak manifested as Serious Sale Shopper, I never waited in the wee hours of the morning to fight other people for … well, whatever they’re fighting for.
And frankly, I was deeply appalled and disgusted by the news reports. Pepper-spraying your fellow shoppers, really? Did we not learn anything from the poor guy who was trampled to death a couple of years ago? How can anyone imagine this whole consumerism thing has not gone way, way too far?
What did we do instead? We worked on a new 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle that I bought at Goodwill for eighty-two cents, and ate lots of leftovers.
We did participate in ‘Small Business Saturday’, however. Despite it being basically a marketing gimmick for American Express, I support the concept.
Jak and I made dinner plans with some friends, and since I didn’t particularly want to cook again just yet (after the all-day marathon of Wednesday and Thursday), we met at a little family-owned Indian restaurant. The proprietress is this sweet older Indian lady who barely speaks any English; she waits tables while her husband and son do the cooking.
We used to get takeout from there pretty regularly, back when we were both working full-time, but in the last couple of years we’ve cut back sharply on our eating-out. I checked Mint to see the last time we were there, and it was nine months ago.
I know that they’ve struggled; they’ve moved three times since we first discovered them, and their restaurant is often nearly empty despite the excellent food. So in addition to getting my masala fix, I feel good for helping them out a little bit — something that no one in line outside a big box store Friday morning (or Thursday night) could say.
(Photo by stromnessdundee.)
My track record is not perfect; on a few occasions in the past two years I’ve indulged in restaurant shrimp which (in the absence of assurances to the contrary) I assume was foreign-farmed. Still, I estimate that’s roughly fifty pounds of environmentally-damaging shrimp I have not purchased so far.
Substitute Oregon shrimpmeat. For West Coast folks this is a winner, being both cheap and relatively local.
Watch for sales on wild shrimp and stock up. Three or four times a year, a grocery will put U.S. wild-caught shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico on sale for $9.99 a pound. These are much larger than their Pacific cousins, usually between 15 and 30 shrimp per pound. Every time this happens, I buy two or three pounds of still-frozen shrimp (separated into one-pound portions), and keep them in the deep freeze for the rare garlicky treat.
Control portions. Though a vital step, this has actually been the most difficult part, because the culture of our home dinners has always been ‘eat as much as you want’. The problem is that for something as yummy as gambas al ajillo (garlic shrimp) we would go through a half-pound or more per person in a single sitting. That’s $20 for just one meal, before counting any of the other ingredients! So I started setting limits on expensive items. I now allot a quarter-pound of large shrimp per person per meal. No one goes hungry; they are welcome to have seconds of rice, veggies, or whatever else is served. This line met with some resistance — Claire pouted, Jak groused — but I secretly think we all wind up appreciating it more because of the scarcity.
His glass eye, he assumed, was the reason that face-to-face interaction with other people almost always ended badly for him. He found it maddeningly difficult to read people’s nonverbal signals, and their verbal signals he often took more literally than they meant them. When trying his best, he was often at his worst. “My compliments tended not to come out right,” he said. “I learned early that if you compliment somebody it’ll come out wrong. For your size, you look good. That’s a really nice dress: it looks homemade.” The glass eye became his private explanation for why he hadn’t really fit in with groups. The eye oozed and wept and required constant attention. It wasn’t the sort of thing other kids ever allowed him to be unself-conscious about. They called him cross-eyed, even though he wasn’t. Every year they begged him to pop his eye out of its socket—but when he complied, it became infected and disgusting and a cause of further ostracism.
The flip side is that I feel a lot more informed now, after reading
Along the way I ran across a ‘
A lot of people are
I don’t tend to use ATMs myself, but if you do it’s worth noting that CCU offers unlimited ATM fee reimbursements — no cap — if you meet the monthly requirements. There’s also a large national network of credit unions whose ATMs accept deposits for each other, in case you have a paper check or cash.
None of the large national and international banks offer rewards checking accounts — only credit unions and small local banks. So if you’re looking to get away from supporting the big banks that helped torpedo the US economy, there’s no conflict.