Being a better consumer is a little like ordering a better cup of coffee — the more you know, the more complicated it is. That doesn’t mean it has to be difficult, and it shouldn’t deter you, either.
Knowing what you’re looking for means having priorities, and we don’t always take the time to sit down as consumers and think about what our priorities are. With that in mind, we’ll take a quick look at some things you as a consumer can use as your rubric for a new plan in 2014.
Price is one thing, of course, but there are those who say you get what you pay for. Do you consider sourcing or buying local to be important? If so, you may find yourself sacrificing some convenience. Or perhapsstyle is your guiding principle — outta the way, cost and conscience!
In truth, you can care about it all, but there will always be trade-offs. Which values will drive your purchases in the new year?
Whatever it is, there are strategies and tools you’ll want to employ, and we’ll provide examples the way all personal-finance people do — through the outwardly simple but undeniably complex world of a cup of coffee, with the help of Katie Parks, office manager at Boxcar Coffee Roasters, 3350 Brighton Blvd.
The skinny:
Why shouldn’t quality be your No. 1 priority? You’ve worked hard for your money. If you’re going to spend it, you should be happy with what you get.
Everybody’s familiar with putting a lot of research into buying a house or a car, but we don’t always know where to start with those products. And when it comes to smaller things, it’s even more complicated. Marketing tells us one thing, labels another, friends tell us something else altogether — and none of these is the complete picture.
Imagine you’re buying something to add to a well-curated collection of belongings. Imagine you’re a minimalist and you buy only what you absolutely need: You’d better be sure what you get is necessary and the best of its kind.
Ryan Nicodemus is the co-founder of The Minimalists, a website preaching the less-is-more gospel. (Sample post: “Killing the Internet at home is the most productive thing I’ve ever done.”)
If he’s in the market for something he doesn’t know already, he’ll research online. For a recent vacuum purchase, he used Google and Consumer Reports.
“I’m glad I did that,” he says. “I was willing to get something that was going to last because the one I had was broken and I didn’t have it that long.”
His budget? “A couple hundred bucks.” After research? He shelled out a mere $70.
Otherwise, Nicodemus says he sticks with what he knows. “I wear J. Crew jeans because I know the quality is good,” he says.
The tools:
As Nicodemus says, Consumer Reports is a great place to start for larger purchases. Their reviews are done professionally — putting them far ahead of sketchieruser reviews such as Amazon.com’s.
Most types of products will also have their own niche blogs and magazines dedicated to them, where you can keep up on developments and trends. Ask people where you shop for the best writers in the field. If they don’t know, you might be shopping in the wrong place to begin with.
The coffee example:
“Try as much as you can,” says Boxcar’s Parks. “Denver especially has a lot of great, small roasteries that source coffee from all over the world.”
She adds that sites like MistoBox and CraftCoffee.com offer subscriptions that can expose consumers to a wide variety of flavors and roasters.MistoBox also has videos on how to best brew your coffee.
For the latest coffee news, Parks says, “I really like sprudge.com. Also,Roast Magazine is great.
The skinny:
Not complicated, right?
Everybody knows how to shop for things based on price. It’s the simplest to measure, right? What’s the price on the tag?
Of course, it doesn’t actually end there. Are there discounts, rewards, seasonal prices, sales, rebates or other things to consider? Again, of course. You can learn the rules of the game and play.
There’s a best time of year to buy almost everything. Calendars with that information come out in January, but they don’t change much. You can find a popular one on lifehacker.com. Last year’s says that the best buys in January are gift cards, video games, suits and Broadway tickets.
And sometimes it makes sense to frontload your spending — from shelling out $79 for Amazon Prime ( if you think you’ll save that much or more on shipping in a year) to making a larger down payment on your house so you don’t pay as much in interest over the next 15 or 30 years.
The tools:
Set a budget and stick to it. If you track your spending, you’ll spend less.
Set up price alerts. If you know you need something but you’re not in a hurry, use a website like camelcamelcamel.com to set a price alert for whatever Amazon’s lowest historical price has been. Chances are it’ll come around again.
Use flash-deal sites. These sites often have one deal per day in a certain category. If you know you’re planning on ramping up your outdoors game, you might want to follow SteepAndCheap, where brand-name outdoors clothing shows up with outlet-style price cuts.
Similar sites include woot.com and its various subdomains (likekids.woot.com, tools.woot.com and wine.woot.com). You might just do a Google search for “flash-deal” and a keyword relating to what you’re looking for.
The coffee example:
The bulk aisle of your grocery store. The coffee aisle of your grocery store.Amazon Subscribe and Save. Pick your poison.
Or, you know what? Don’t drink coffee. You’ll be fine.
The skinny:
Was your car made in America? If it was, how much of it was? Did the components of your smartphone come from mines or factories with bad human-rights records?
High-profile sweat-shop disasters in recent years — nearly 300 dead at a garment factory fire in Karachi, Pakistan, and more than 1,000 dead in a factory collapse in Dhaka, Bangladesh, to name just two — have caused more concern for just where our stuff comes from and why it’s so cheap sometimes.
“I don’t think anybody is intentionally looking to consume pesticides, but people are doing it without regard for the fact that they are, simply because of price,” says David Corsun, director of the Knoebel School of Hospitality Management at the University of Denver.
“There’s also sociocultural sustainability,” he says. “There are places in the world where things are produced at the expense of those who live there. That’s not such a good thing.”
Labels — indicating that a product is organic or brought to market via fair trade — can be great, or they can be deceiving. If you’re making sourcing and materials major pillars of your consumer lifestyle, you should understand what the labels mean, specifically. Sometimes there’s a dispute over what they should mean, and sometimes there’s a change.
On food products, a USDA “organic” seal means it “has 95 percent or more organic content.”
The usda.gov website lists other ways — “free-range,” “natural,” “humane” — that foods can be labeled and what they mean. From the “natural” section: “There are no standards or regulations for the labeling of natural food products if they do not contain meat or eggs.” Hm, did you pay extra for the “natural” juice this morning?
The tools:
Labels and tags are a nice starting point, but this is one area in which you’ll have to do a lot of your own homework.
“The choices one makes are really dependent on how educated the consumer is,” Corsun says.
For example, it’s great to know which foods are in season when.
“When raspberries go on sale at the height of the season, if organics are important to you, you may stock up and freeze your own,” he says.
Research online is important, too, Corsun says.
“Online is a great resource, but even there you have to be judicious,” he says. Corsun says that people are prone to finding information that confirms their suspicions and biases, and that a more rounded search, including seeking out information that specifically disagrees with what you suspect, can be beneficial.
The coffee example:
“I would always just talk to your barista,” says Boxcar’s Parks. “They’re going to know the most about the coffees they have.”
“You can always look up the farm that the coffee comes from, and most roasteries will be able to tell you where they purchase the coffees from,” Parks says. She suggests asking the roastery, or checking their site. If they don’t know, that’s telling, too.
The skinny:
You can buy almost anything bearing the iconic Colorado flag — or an emblem derived from it — these days. Hats, shirts, underwear — they all have it. Local pride is nothing new, and the push for buying local is established enough that when the state designed a new logo for Colorado-made products, it raised a controversy over its exclusion of the flag.
Here, the buy-local movement may have gotten something of a boost from pride in Colorado beer, even before the explosion of the craft-beer scene.
Coloradolocalfirst.com cites three main reasons to buy locally made goods — or imported goods from local businesses, as opposed to local locations of national chains:
One, locally owned businesses tend to spend money with other locally owned businesses, keeping money circulating in the community, rather than sending some of it to an HQ in, say, Bentonville, Ark.
Two, buying goods made locally often reduces the carbon footprint of the purchase. The less the product has to travel, the less energy it used.
And three, local business owners are more likely to care about your community, because they live in it, too, so they’ll be more respectful of and generous toward local concerns.
The tools:
Find local business boosters by searching online for “buy local (your town’s name)”, use sites like Yelp, and seek out specific business associations in your area. For some categories, there will be clubs you can join, like SOCIAL, Supporters of Colorado Indigenous Ale and Lager.
In other categories, you may need to just seek out the right blogs and personalities to follow for updates — and ask those people when you’ve got a question.
The coffee example:
“Denver is kind of exploding right now with small coffee shops and roasteries,” Boxcar’s Parks says.
For people interested in going the extra mile to tap into that community, she mentioned denvercoffeelife.com and the Rocky Mountain Craft Coffee Alliance.
There’s also something called the Caffeine Crawl, a tour of five or six area businesses (focusing, naturally, on caffeinated products) with presentations and free samples. This year, events were held in major cities across the country, including St. Louis, Boston, San Francisco and Denver.
They expect to host events in Boulder and Fort Collins in July of 2014. Watch caffeinecrawl.com for updates.
The skinny:
It may be a while before we can outsource our driving and walking, but there’s a market for it, judging by the buzz over Amazon teasing that it’s testing using drones for delivery somewhere down the line — and Google’s bewildering self-driving cars and sudden purchase of robotics companies.
Both companies are among the drivers of a serious push to automate and streamline everything we do — while making cash hand over fist, of course — by being omnipresent and very nearly omniscient. Amazon, for example, will allow you to “subscribe” to household items like toilet paper, so it arrives at your doorstep monthly.
You can also find, to the dismay of environmentalists, single-use products for nearly every need these days. The only one that seems to have gone out of style is the formerly ubiquitous disposable camera.
We hardly think about it now, but single-serve yogurt cups are a great example. It doesn’t take long at the grocery store to see that a larger tub would save you money, but you’ve made the calculation in your head that you want the convenience of yogurt being ready to go, don’t mind throwing away a cup each day, and don’t want to spend a minute in the morning scooping yogurt into a container you carry with you.
Time is money, as they say, and you’ve chosen to outsource mundane tasks because convenience is your priority.
The tools:
The aforementioned Amazon Subscribe and Save is designed for people who don’t want to spend time and energy going to the store. You can’t “subscribe” to just anything on Amazon, but the selection of household products, groceries and toiletries is pretty broad.
If you want a product you can’t subscribe to — or just want to outsource all of your shopping — you might be able to hire someone to do it for you on a site like TaskRabbit.
Want higher-end convenience? How about having personal-care items or clothes chosen by stylists delivered right to your door? The Internet’s got you covered. Birchbox for the former, Trunk Club for the latter (for men). Oh, and there’s also BarkBox — for dogs, naturally.
The coffee example:
“We offer a coffee subscription,” Boxcar Coffee Roaster’s Katie Parks says. And it’s not just Boxcar doing it.
“A lot of small roasteries are doing it,” she says. “It’s getting more popular as people are realizing that it’s something that exists, especially around the holidays.”
Increasingly, you also see those single-cup coffeemakers made famous byKeurig. They take all of the thinking out of making coffee for one, although you end up with more stuff to throw away. A middle ground might be to use a reusable “K-Cup.”
You’ve still outsourced most of the work and thinking, but haven’t externalized it all to some landfill somewhere.
Source: http://www.trentonian.com
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