When shopping for a washing machine—or a car, or a DVD player, or a stroller—consumers have lots of options. Competition and innovation help bring prices down, and generally speaking, the products that give the most bang for the buck are successful in the long run. With health care as it is today, there is limited competition and …
Why No Average Joes at Obama’s Health Care Town Hall?
ABC hosted a town hall-style forum on health care with the president last night. But the people sitting in the audience and asking questions certainly weren’t representative of any town in the U.S. Questions came primarily from white collar types—a PR exec, several doctors, one woman was supposedly in the Bush administration. The one …
It’s a Deal: Free Quart of Paint from Glidden
The Glidden National Paint Giveaway starts today. Check out the promotion here. Then select a color, and Glidden will send you a quart of eggshell finish in a few weeks. The offer is good through July 2, and there’s a limit of one quart per household.
It’s a Deal: $20 Off Orders at Wine.com
Plug in the promotional code SUMMER2009 when placing an order of 12 or more bottles at Wine.com and you’ll receive $20 off. Valid on orders placed by Friday, June 26.
Q&A With Groupon.com Founder Andrew Mason
“Collective Buying Power” is the apt slogan of Groupon, a rapidly-expanding bulk-buying website in which members get big discounts on everything from yoga classes to pro baseball tickets to teeth-whitening services to live lobsters—so long as a certain number of members sign up for the offer.
Cheapskate Wisdom from … Mob Boss Michael Franzese
“Sometimes it is better to accept less in a negotiation than to walk away a total loser.”
Read more about Franzese’s book here.
The U.S. retirement system: Pretty good on average. But who’s average?
The OECD published its charmingly mistitled once-every-few-years report Pensions at a Glance on Tuesday. It’s 280 pages long, and there appears to be lots of stuff in it about the troubles the financial/economics crisis poses for pension funding. But I always go straight for the charts that compare pension systems across countries.
The …
Chain Restaurant Deals That Mysteriously Disappear
Down toward the bottom of today’s Times story about deals at restaurants like Applebee’s, Ruby Tuesday, T.G.I. Friday’s, and Chili’s is a little nugget that every cheapskate should be aware of—namely, that some restaurant franchises hide the special offers from diners so that they’ll unknowingly pay full price.
Recession Generation: “The End of Disney World”
USA Today examines the impact of the recession on younger folks—Millennials or Gen Y, as they’re known. Or will they be known as the “Recession Generation”? Hard to say. No one thought of WWII era folks as “The Greatest Generation” until decades after the war. The immediate impact of today’s hard times: We’ll all probably hate the …
Obama says the Federal Reserve has done a ‘fine job.’ Has it?
The prez said today that the Federal Reserve’s response to the financial crisis has been A-OK:
Obama, speaking at a midday press conference, defended the performance of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke after the financial crisis.
Bernanke has done a “fine job” and “performed well,” the president said.
I don’t think Obama’s praise is entirely …
Cheapskate Wisdom from … Mad Magazine
“The only reason a great many American families don’t own an elephant is that they have never been offered an elephant for a dollar down and easy weekly payments.”
It’s a Deal: $29 Flights to the Bahamas, Cancun
JetBlue is having a sale with tickets starting at $29 each way from Fort Lauderdale to Nassau or Cancun. Tickets must be purchased by June 26. Check out the details here.