Has everyone just forgotten about business? Has the economy just made everyone stop caring about doing anything to get a sale or how about doing SOMETHING?  I drove into Kitchen Express in Newington, CT to ask about countertops. I have a dream about a blue one matching my cobalt blue and white kitchen.

Leslie Jacobs

Isn’t Kitchen Express always asking us to stop by their place for their sale? Which are on commercials almost every day? So, I went.

Walking in I saw no one.  NO One.  Then, out of the blue, (PUN INTENDED)  I see a woman holding some papers, OH I feel a letdown when I realize she’s a customer too.

The woman and I talked and she showed me the paper about the sale.  Blue Hermes for only $39.99 installed!  Is that a bargain? I would like to ask someone, maybe a sales person—but I could not see anyone.

Then I saw a family and a man sitting at a round table.  I approached, apologized for interrupting and asked about the “blue Hermes.”  The guy, said, it’s on the table and I am busy with two more appointments after these people.  Then, he went back to speaking to the family.

So I walked over to the place where the man said it would be.  For extra help I asked the woman customer if she knew and we both looked on the ledge with different samples of countertops.  There was no Blue Hermes.

To be fair, this has happened at other stores.  There is not enough help at the store when a customer has a question and the store feels that we the customers are not buying enough to put more people to work.  So, the new normal is not having questions answered and we customers are meant to find our answers.  That just sucks!

Have an Organized Day!

Leslie Jacobs

www.lesmess.com

Office–8602254848

Every week, I scour the grocery store flyers and match up coupons to all the sale items to bring you the best deals.  This week, I’m featuring Stop & Shop.  To see the deals and coupon match ups for Big Y, Price Chopper, Stop & Shop, ShopRite, and Geissler’s just stop by my website, Gina’s Kokopelli.

• ·      Don’t understand the lingo?  Go here.
• Stop & Shop Coupon Policy

Johnsonville brats 2/$4 ($1/2 01-08-12 SS = 1.50 each)

Coke 2 liters .99

Chef Boyardee canned pasta 1.00 ($1/5 01-01-12 SS – EXP 2/5/12 = .80 each)

Hunt’s tomatoes 1.00 ($1/3 01-22-12 SS = .66 each)

Hormel chili with beans 1.25 (.55/2 01-15-12 SS = .70 each)

Carnation Evaporated milk 1.25 (.50/2 01-08-12 RP = .75 each)

Land O Lakes deli cheese 4.99 lb ($1/1 01-29-12 SS = 3.99)

Scotties tissues 1.00 ($1/5 01-08-12 RP = .80 each)

Snuggle fabric softener 3.99 (.50/1 01-01-12 RP = 2.99)

Gina

Gina is the creator of Gina’s Kokopelli, a Connecticut blog dedicated to all things coupon, free and cheap. You can get more frugal tips, freebies, coupons, and great deals by visiting her blog at http://ginaskokopelli.com. Gina also teaches couponing classes and would love to be invited to your organization or business to teach a class. For more information or to inquire about a couponing class, please email her at ginaskokopelli@yahoo.com. She’s also happy to answer any couponing question you may have! You can listen to Gina every Friday live on the Talk Of Connecticut at 5 p.m. with host Dan Lovallo on WDRC AM 1360 in Hartford, WSNG AM 610 in  Torrington, WWCO AM 1240 in Waterbury and WMMW AM 1470 in Meriden.

“That was fast” I said. Then I bit into the hot, crispy pizza. She had used the “pizza” setting, which allows for different sizes and frozen or fresh. The result was superior to the warmed leftovers my current toaster oven turned out. It got me to thinking that I was in the market for a better one.

My last two toaster ovens were disappointing. The $99 category hadn’t been good at toasting bread, nor reliable for baking. If you check the ratings on Amazon you will see that the field of experience reveals these disappointments on many models. (I laughed at a picture of a $50 Delonghi model with 2 Cornish game hens cooking in it. I wouldn’t trust $10 worth of poultry in such an appliance). It was time to get serious.

The Breville Smart Oven $250 price tag costs more than double of many other models, although you can also spend more. The Smart Oven is a little larger than a typical toaster oven and has an attractive but low key brushed stainless finish. You need to check your counter space if you are tight for room. As in buying any product, check the reviews on Amazon.com first. This unit has almost a perfect rating.

Toaster ovens have multiple cooking functions, but at the start, they should toast well. The Breville excelled at this with accuracy; there are settings for how many slices as well as how dark you want to be. One for bagels as well.

Next comes the baking, roasting, and convection functions. I have successfully made macaroni & cheese, cookies, stuffed peppers, muffins – things that in the past I would never rely upon a toaster oven for. I have used the broiler to crisp certain recipes and that worked well also. The secret is that the Breville keeps temperature consistency better than the competition.

Interestingly, Hammacher.com offers “The Best Toaster Oven,” but doesn’t use the brand name. The Wall Street Journal describes the oven as capable of doing “just about everything we use the oven for.” I agree. I use my regular oven less and save energy as well.

Alyssa Shapiro frequently blogs for CtWatchdog.

Her column reveals what people are buying, why, and whether it is worthwhile.   In satirical fashion she chronicles the sacred cows and pink elephants of our consumer culture.  She writes about our voracious spending habits from her post in Fairfield County, Connecticut.

With a Bachelors Degree in Marketing, Alyssa’s career began as an advertising executive for 14 years. She worked with The Hartford Courant, Connecticut Magazine, and Lamar Advertising. From there she moved abroad and travelled internationally. After seeing the world outside American suburbs, Alyssa returned to Connecticut with a fresh perspective and found her voice in writing “What It Is.” She published 160 columns for Hersam Acorn in the award-winning weekly newspaper The Wilton Bulletin.

Her website is

www.alyssashapiro.com

“Advertisers have every right to create excitement for their product, but to be a smart shopper you need to understand and interpret the language of hype,” says Edmunds.com Sr. Consumer Advice Editor Philip Reed. “Once you’ve translated an ad into ‘consumerspeak,’ you’ll know if the vehicle featured is a good deal for you.”

According to Edmunds.com, the five most common marketing ruses found in automotive ads are:

1)       Showing the top trim, but advertising the base price. In TV ads it’s common to see a fully loaded, top-trim model of a vehicle on the screen while the price of a base model is being displayed. You might assume that you could buy the car pictured at the price presented. Wrong. The small print should clarify this, if you can manage to read it.

2)       Preposterous MPG. A hot-looking sport coupe is tearing up the landscape when the text flies across the TV screen: “40 mpg!” Granted, this car is capable of getting 40 mpg on the highway, provided you drive like a fuel-efficiency-focused hypermiler. But you won’t get anywhere near that mileage if you’re driving full-throttle like the guy in the ad.

3)       Lease Payments Too Good to Be True. You’re innocently checking the box scores in the newspaper when you see a luxury car ad promoting lease payments for only $199 a month. If you left for the dealership right away, you might not notice the small print saying that $4,999 is required to start this lease.

4)       The Phantom Special. A local newspaper ad features the phrase “One at this price,” which is a tip-off to what insiders call an “ad car.” It’s usually the purple one with crank windows and no A/C — cheap, but not necessarily in a good way. If you go to the dealership and ask to test drive the one-only car, it’s likely A) “Already been sold,” B) “Out on a test-drive” or C) “In the back of the lot, and I’d have to move 50 cars to get to it.” The “good” news, of course, is that they have lots of other cars for sale. The bad news is that those cars are a lot more expensive.

5)       Rebates for Everyone – But Not You. You see an ad for the car of your dreams, listed at a price that barely squeaks into your budget.  So you run down to the dealership only to find out that to get to the reduced price the dealership factored in a military rebate, college-graduate rebate, brand “loyalty bonus” or other discounts and rebates that are not available to folks like you.

Edmunds.com even has a bonus tip for those seeking a financed deal with no interest: “Zero percent financing is only for qualified buyers; if you don’t have excellent credit, those advertising messages don’t apply to you,” noted Reed. “Edmunds.com analysts estimate that only about one in four car buyers qualify for the lowest interest rate offered.”

Full details on all of these tricks – and how consumers can dodge them – are available at http://www.edmunds.com/car-buying/5-ways-car-ads-can-lie.html.

Car ads can often be filled with insider lingo and other confusing language. Edmunds.com helps consumers decipher the meanings of these phrases in “How to Read a Car Ad” at http://www.edmunds.com/car-buying/how-to-read-a-car-ad.html.
About Edmunds.com, Inc. (http://www.edmunds.com/help/about/index.html)
Edmunds.com, the premier online resource for automotive information, launched in 1995 as the first automotive information Web site. Its revered mobile site, Android App and five-star iPhone app makes car pricing and other research tools available for car shoppers at dealerships and on the go. Its automotive enthusiast Web site, InsideLine.com, is the most-read car publication of its kind. Its highly regarded mobile site and iPhone app features the wireless Web’s most comprehensive gallery of automotive photos and videos. Edmunds.com Inc. is headquartered in Santa Monica, California, and maintains a satellite office in suburban Detroit. Follow Edmunds.com on Twitter@edmunds and fan Edmunds.com on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/edmunds.