Hardly.

A Whole Foods opened its doors to my neighbourhood yesterday and today, after work, I decided to see what all the hubbub was about. This was my second time shopping at a local- and organic-centric market; I wasn’t terribly impressed during my first time around at the local farmer’s markets, so going in I wasn’t expecting much. My only exposure to Whole Foods was the six seasons of Top Chef (and one of Top Chef Masters) that was drilled into my psyche. However, as I stepped into Whole Foods, I pretty much said to corporate America, “Here’s my wallet, now make me want to buy stuff!”

My first impression upon entering the store was, “Man is it cramped in here.” Most grocery stores present you with a wipe open area to sell you their produce before shuffling you down the smaller aisles for boxed goods. Whole Foods however presents you with a wall of citrus, albeit colourful citrus, and makes you walk around it to the rest of the produce section. It was odd.

The best example of the “wall of citrus” you’re greeted with upon entering Whole Foods. Try to ignore the random pair of people posing… Photo credit to the store’s Facebook fan page.

Another thing – for being a grocery store, Whole Foods doesn’t sell a lot of produce. Sure, the small amount they do sell is vibrant, fresh, colourful, and impeccably stacked, but the compact size of the department made me think that they just didn’t sell a lot of products.

This theme of smaller-sized departments was also apparent in the dairy aisle. Most grocery stores are huge sections for produce, wide aisles in the back for meat and dairy, and then a wider aisle on the left for more dairy, ice creams, and possibly beer. Though it is pleasant on the eyes, Whole Foods is just backwards to what I’m used to!

In my opinion, the Brits have nailed down the concept of beautiful grocery stores with beautiful packaging. If you’ve ever stepped foot in a Marks and Spencer in the UK or Ireland, you’ll know what I’m talking about. From the clear and striking typography on their in-store brands to the black bins that house all the carefully arranged, individually packaged produce, it just makes you want to buy everything. And their juices are so delicious yet evil, since they’re straight, undiluted fruit juices, which equates to a caloric and sugary-filled death. I miss England if you can’t tell.

Since there are no good pictures of the interior of Marks and Spencer, this is the next best thing. This is Walmart’s organic produce section, its attempt to subvert Whole Food’s grasp on the image of local and organic, by copying Marks and Spencer. Photo credit to ELI MEIR KAPLAN from the article, The Great Grocery Smackdown.

A photo from Marks and Spencer’s showing the simple and striking typography. I loved how they didn’t have to resort to pictures and symbols, but let the food do the talking. Photo credit to gorriti.

Enough about the décor though, let’s talk prices. Prices are the primary factor in what I do and do not buy. It’s not the healthiest thing nor is it the most fun, but when I’m just cooking for myself, most the time every expense is spared. I’m slowly leaning away from that concept however and moving from a complete miser to intelligently frugal.

When I entered the Whole Foods produce section, I was absolutely floored by some of the prices they were charging. Few items I thought were a good deal; most of them were outrageous. Take for example bell peppers – red, green, orange, yellow – they were going for $2.50 per pound; my local grocery store has them on sale for $0.88 per pound. Yellow and green squash, $2.00 per pound; local store, $0.88 per pound. On most of the produce I was finding a markup of at least twice the price if not more.

I was able to find some good deals though. 2 packages of blackberries for $4.00 (they were really firm and fresh, so thumbs up), locally grown Fuji apples were $0.99 per pound. Mushrooms, common and exotic, were also fairly priced.

Though they did have some exotic fruits and vegetables like rhubarb, starfruit, cactus leaves, etc., they still lacked some of the wackier items I see at my local grocery store. I swear there’s an aisle just for the Mediterranean immigrants. If I felt adventurous I could buy whole coconuts, literal stalks of bamboo, giant who knows what. I really have to take a picture the next time I’m there.

My one expensive purchase was a package of chicken breasts that was on sale for $5.00 per pound. Absolutely ridiculous, eh? My usual store sells chicken breasts for $2.00 per pound. In poultry alone I would’ve saved almost $8.00! If I were a healthy person and didn’t eat out as often as I did, these grocery costs would add up quickly! We’ll see how these chicken breasts taste, but I don’t have the refrigerator space nor the lack of personal bias to do a double blind test.

I think it’s a nice place to browse and maybe have an already cooked, sit down lunch, but I wouldn’t do all my shopping at Whole Foods. The increase in price just don’t justify the need for local, organic, and fair trade, for me personally.

After spending a little over $30 at Whole Foods, I headed out to see what the hubbub was about Trader Joe’s. The one near me is actually very small and unfortunately it doesn’t sell wine. I only realized after asking the cashier that New York state doesn’t sell wine in grocery stores. How disappointing since I remember browsing the wine aisles in Seattle thinking, “Maybe I should pick a bottle up tonight…”

Overall I wasn’t impressed with Trader Joe’s either. Since the whole organic / fair trade angle didn’t speak to me, all I went on was value and selection. The meat section was tiny and pitiful (I can deal with it being tiny, but the meat looked almost unhealthy in its packaging) and the whole store just didn’t offer a lot of selection.

The one thing that I will comment on however was the friendliness of their staff. Everyone seemed genuinely happy and willing to help you. Maybe it was a byproduct of the store being so small. Compare this to the almost fabricated helpfulness that the Whole Foods management must have drilled into their employees. Not to say that the Whole Foods staff wasn’t helpful (an employee walked me over to another aisle to show me where a product was), but it didn’t seem as genuine.

I don’t see the whole deal with eating local, organic, and fair trade, but this is just my personal opinion. I could see myself supporting fair trade food first, because everyone should be paid fairly, but it’s dollars and cents for me. Also, I would find it hard for myself to support fair trade food while not batting an eye when purchasing clothing made by the child labour of countries like Indonesia and Cambodia (or have the sweatshops moved onto poorer countries now?).

I go grocery shopping every 2 to 2.5 weeks, spending an average of about $40. If I were to buy local, organic, and fair trade, I’d look at spending an average of probably $10-$15 more per trip. Seems like not a big deal, but over a year’s time, that would amount to between $230 and $350. It’s still a small figure in the grand scheme of things, but each purchase adds up.

And even though there are studies upon studies showing that organic meat and produce are healthier for you, I can’t help but overlook the fact that there have been generations raised on non-organic, non-local foods, and they’ve turned out fine. Would we be really that much better off gorging ourselves on too much organic protein? Or better off eating boatloads of non-organic greens?

That’s where I draw my arguments from – the fact that the non-organic, non-local food isn’t bad in the least, but people have misconstrued normal (non-organic) and better (organic) to be worse and normal. We should instead turn our attention to what would really make us healthy: normal diet and exercise. We can eat all the organic cranberry and pecan granola cookies we want (they’re so good…) and think we’re eating healthily, but that doesn’t address the need that most people live sedentary lives, myself included. So that’s why, in my usual longwinded nature, is why Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s was nice to visit, but I’ll be returning to my normal grocery store. I’ll return next time with a picture of the crazy aisle of vegetables.

P.S. “longwinded nature”? Baby, I’m back!

I’ve been trumpeting my opinion that figure skating is not a sport as long as I can remember (always to the cut eye given by my mom and sister), but I could never fully articulate why until now.

The arguments I used before were never very strong because the same arguments could be turned against snowboarding. The reasons included there wasn’t any precision (they weren’t competing against boundaries or a clock); there wasn’t judging accuracy due to the artistic element; and there wasn’t judging consistency because of the human involvement. All you have to do is point to the Salé and Peltier scandal of the 2002 Olympics to see what a farse figure skating judging can be.

But the newfound reason why figure skating is not a sport is because skaters can win on artistic merit and not on technical merit. It has become glorified ballet on ice. Some would argue that’s what it is, but I mean that it should be there to be admired like the ballet and not competed in.

I didn’t watch any of the programs (like I’d watch figure skating…), but this past Thursday, Evan Lysacek of the USA beat out Russia’s Evgeni Plushenko for gold in men’s figure skating. And the big controversy? Plushenko landed a quad while Lysacek didn’t even attempt one. Both apparently skated flawless routines. Lysacek more of less won on artistic merit.

There were only three skaters that attempted the quad and only two successfully landed them. That’s like giving the slam dunk competition title to someone who doesn’t dunk as hard as their competitor (um…). That’s like giving the title to a snowboarder that does a really clean 1080 instead of the snowboarder who did a 1260. You get the idea.

How can a sport allow someone to win when they don’t push their technical abilities to their max? The whole point of a sport is to continually push yourself to be better, faster, stronger, etc. Skaters should be looking up to people like Plushenko and say, "I want to spin 5 times!" Instead, they’ll look up to the gold medal winner Lysacek and say, "Well as long as I nail the safe jumps and dance my heart out, I can win gold."

I’m not alone in my assessment.

After the short program, Plushenko called out the rest of the skaters saying, "Without the quadruple, I’m sorry, but it’s not men." I love his bravado and his arrogance, this coming from a man that is able to pull his leg back to his head and spin… (a.k.a., Biellmann spin).

Then after losing to Lysacek, he says to the Russian media, "For someone to stand on top of the podium with the gold medal around his neck by just doing triple jumps, to me it’s not progress, it’s a regress because we’ve done triples 10 or even 20 years ago. Just doing nice transitions and being artistic is not enough because figure skating is a sport, not a show."

Well, Plushenko, we may disagree on it being a sport, but I definitely agree with you that figure skating is more of a show when you don’t award a quadruple accordingly. In fact, with the new scoring rules instituted after the Salt Lake City debacle (removing the beloved and relatable 6.0 scale), quads are given a base-level of 9.8 +/- 3 points based on execution. A triple Axel is given a base-level of 8.2 +/- 3 points. So it’s very possible a triple will get more points than a quad, which doesn’t make sense since the quad is so much harder to execute.

I remember watching Elvis Stojko put on his macho performances oh so many years ago instead of some of the more frou-frou performances these days. I remember watching his martial arts sequences and watching him try (and fail) the quad over and over again, but it was exciting for figure skating to watch these athletes push themselves so hard. And really, I’d only ever watch figure skating for the falls…

And Stojko agrees with me (or I with him). He even went so far as to say that Thursday was the night they killed figure skating. He compared Lysacek’s performance to Brian Boitano’s routine from 22 years ago, and went so far as to say some junior skaters can pull that off. "In what other sports do you have to hold back in order to win?" says Stojko.

"Figure skating gets no respect because of outcomes like this. More feathers, head-flinging and so-called step sequences done at walking speed – that’s what the system wants.

"I am going to watch hockey, where athletes are allowed to push the envelope. A real sport."

I couldn’t have said it any better, Elvis. And I can’t personify the more feathers comment any more than with none other than Johnny Weir. Simply wow.

If you’re sick and tired about hearing me talk about the controversies of tipping, don’t worry. I’m not going to go off about it. Instead, I’m just going to offer some food for thought.

I was raised on the idea of tipping being 10% for good service and as I’ve grown older, that’s gone from 10% to paying the tax on the subtotal – which was 15% and now 13%, to some people advocating a 20% premium on goods and services for tip.

I bring this up because today I was reading through the terms and conditions for my AT&T rebate card (my gripes about rebates being issued not in cash but in non-retrievable, pre-paid debit cards is an argument for another day). In it, under the Tipping and Gas Stations section, it reads:

Just like using a credit card, merchants including restaurants/bars, taxis, beauty spas/salons, and barbers will initially process your bill for an additional 20% to allow for potential tip. If you do not add a tip on the Card, your Card will not be charged. However, an addition 20% will be held until the purchase is finalized. For example, if your bill is $50, your Card balance needs to be at least $60 to cover a 20% tip, or your transaction will be declined.

This was definitely news to me. From a business perspective it makes sense that the credit card companies would make sure you had enough available credit to cover the “final cost” of the meal. What interests me more is the 20% figure. They must’ve gotten their number crunchers to find the average amount people tip and then go above that by a few percentage points to give them some safety. So what does that say about tippers? Either the credit card companies are trusting and so they only go above the average amount of ~15% by a few points to land at 20%, or they’re really paranoid and even though people tip on average ~10%, they double that amount so that the charge won’t be declined.

I’ve never experienced this thankfully. I’ve always been raised to treat credit as just cash delayed by 30-days. The one time my credit card did get maxed out, I laughed when the CSR told me. That was when I was leaving for London on the eve of 2008 and in preparation for that trip, I had bought a Working Holiday visa, round-trip airfare from Toronto to London, two digital cameras (which I ended up getting the the only one that had shipped for free because the store I bought it from was a scam and they disappeared with my money), my laptop, and a bunch of other stuff. It was also nice to call up VISA, tell them my credit was maxed out, and then ask for more. And have them approve it!

I love saving money.

Thankfully, saving money for me is a game rather than a necessity. I fully admit the irony of going above and beyond to save a dollar on a purchase of several hundreds of dollars, but I won’t think twice when spending five dollars at Burger King on a value meal.

Who am I kidding? Medium-sized meals these days are costing almost six dollars before tax.

I refer to saving money as a game because at the end of the day, it’s not about having $100 more in my pocket, but it’s the feeling that I’ve saved $100. These two phrases may sound the same and my bank balance won’t know the difference, but I just love squeezing every last dollar out of a purchase I was going to make regardless of its price.

To walk you through my process of making large purchases, especially when it comes to electronics, I will use my brother’s recent purchase of a Canon T1i digital SLR. In this case, a little time and effort translated into a camera that would have retailed at $814.69 (all figures US) after tax into a final retail price of $489.98 after tax.

This amounts to a savings of $324.71.

Not too shabby, if I do say so myself.

Never Buy on Impulse

We’re all familiar with the perils of impulse buying – wasted money for items that we say will use, but never end up using. When it comes to impulse buying, I have a pretty good track record. The last impulse buy I can distinctively remember was a few years ago when I got Future Shop to price match Dell.ca for an 8GB Class 4 SDHC memory card that ended up costing me ~$60 CAD instead of over ~$150 CAD. Did I have a camera at that point that could use SDHC (or used SD cards for that matter)? Nope.

The reason I bring this up is because just like air travel, electronics pricing goes up and down over short periods of time. For example, the Canon T1i retails at $800, but is regularly on sale for $750, and during Black Friday it was as low as $720. By waiting patiently and watching its trends, you can determine when it is a good or bad time to buy.

With my brother’s camera, I waited several months after he told me of his intentions to enter the DSLR field, knowing that Black Friday would present with some deals. And Black Friday didn’t disappoint with many companies like Amazon and Walmart selling the kit for $720. That’s $80 saved off the undiscounted retail price!

I love how those two are essentially locked in an eternal battle for market domination by constantly undercutting each other; the consumer ultimately ends up winning.

Some great tools to use to price stalk and keep an eye out for deals are Bing Shopping, Google Product Search, Slickdeals, and for my Canadian readers, RedFlagDeals.

Aside: Shopping for Digital Cameras

A special note for anyone looking to purchase digital cameras, there are two or three main times you will want to be wary of purchasing a digital camera because of potential price drops and worse, technological obsolescence. If you time it right and you don’t need the potential upgrades being offered in new models, you can save on clearance stock of older models. Also be aware that with digital SLRs, their product lifecycle ranges from 12 months for consumer-level DSLRs to 24 months or longer for semi-professional and professional DSLRs.

Every year at the beginning of February, the PMA conference is held where the major companies including Canon and Nikon announce new models. Usually camera information is announced or "leaked" in January leading up to the conference, but nothing will really be announced afterwards.

Every other even year in September, Photokina is held in Cologne, Germany. This is also a major photography conference and during Photokina years, announcements are split between the PMA and Photokina. Again, camera details are usually leaked well in advance.

And then there are other events and conferences. For example, some companies choose to announce some products – mostly consumer digital cameras – during CES (Consumer Electronics Show). Also, rumor has it that Canon is choosing to delay the announcement of the Canon 1Ds Mark IV and several lenses until right before the Olympics this year, so by putting off on the impulse buying and putting your ear to the ground, you will have a sense when certain technologies will be released.

Lastly, there are dedicated rumor sites if you’re a gadget freak like me: Canon Rumors, Nikon Rumors, and for pretty much every other company clumped into one site, Photo Rumors.

Next Time: Discounts, Coupons, and Getting Cash Back

In order to make these articles more digestible, I’m breaking them into smaller pieces. Next time I’m going to discuss using discounts, coupons, and cash back programs to really save the bulk of your savings. Till next time.

Oftentimes I find myself choosing the logical side of an argument, unfortunately to a fault. I will almost always opt for numbers and figures over emotions and empathy, which is why I find myself doing a lot of contemplating and people-watching from the two major events of the past month – the Christmas underwear would-be terrorist and the earthquake in Haiti. I’m going to try to discuss the two and try to sound rational and not heartless, but I suspect the latter won’t come across…

For starters, I’ve never been a fan of the TSA or any airport security to begin with. Their asinine baggage size and quantity rules and excessive delays have caused me countless numbers of headaches. “What, miss overpaid airport security agent? If I have my camera bag on my shoulder that’s two bags but if I stuff it into my carry-on, that’s permitted then? You do realize it’s the same bag, occupying the same amount of space? Why don’t you go yell at the people dragging their carry-on suitcases that need assistance putting it into the overhead compartments?”

I’ve also sweated profusely running to my gate only to have to wait in line to be screened while I watch the second hand on my watch tick by, nearing the closing time of my flight. I will admit that’s my fault but I refuse to acknowledge a need to get to the airport more than an hour before my hour-long flight (London to Dublin).

Airport security lacks common sense through and through and they don’t even do anything to protect us. I’ve gotten onboard with an empty water bottle and an unscreened bag-full of 100mL liquid bottles because I chose not to take it out of my carry-on bag (never once was I asked to take it out and have everything rescanned). If I wanted to pack a chemistry set and then bust it out in the onboard lavatory, I’m sure something could have been concocted. There I go again; I probably will get blacklisted from flying because of this…

Which brings me to the inordinate amount of money spent on airport security and the “War on Terror” in general. The Department of Homeland Security has been green-lighted for a $55 billion 2010 budget. That number doesn’t even register with me. $55 billion? I know that’s less than 10 percent of what the economic bailout was, but what will it buy us? More safety and security? Probably not.

This will probably buy us more invasive and unnecessary scanners at the airport; it will probably fund more grumpy and untrained idiots giving us unnecessary pat-downs. To put things in perspective, you are safer flying through the air than pretty much anywhere else on the ground. We have a 0.000014 percent chance of dying while flying vs. a 50 percent chance of dying at cardiovascular disease, yet we’re okay to being patted down but not running a mile or two everyday.

“Fewer people have died from terrorism in the past thirty years than quarrelsome Americans with handguns in the last eight months.” In fact, if terrorists started bombing subway cars, coffee cafes, public events, or places where I consider a part of my everyday routine, then I would be scared. But if they’re not trying to attack my everyday life, then the government that’s supposed to help the people should stop harassing the people. The American government needs to read up on the Intifada, where Hamas was bombing buses and coffee shops and night clubs. Those are real concerns, not what the American public is scared about.

Stolen from Gizmodo.

If only we cared about the things that actually killed a large number of people. Like earthquakes. I guess that means Mother Nature’s ass is next in line to be waterboarded. (These jokes sound vaguely familiar and I will acknowledge that I probably am just reciting what John Stewart said. Oh well.) But in all seriousness, there is a huge humanitarian disaster going on in Haiti right now. Tens of thousands of people have died with estimates going up to over 100,000. Over three million people are displaced and people are genuinely concerned with what’s going on there. So why is this senile old bat raising this issue in a blog about perspective?

Well, in this age of Twitter and Facebook, I feel like I’m drowning in Haiti awareness campaigns. At least before it was calls to action by donating money, but now they’re bordering on the stupid with “Haiti solidarity events” and “wear red for Haiti” campaigns. Wearing red for Haiti will no more help them than telling your Facebook friends the colour of your bra will help cure breast cancer, but no ones ripping on Haiti and everyone’s ripping on breast cancer, except me.

The closest natural disaster I can remember that reached this level of notoriety was the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed over 230,000 people. Back when it happened, I was living at home and was able to get a constant stream of CNN and NBC. It was 24-hours-a-day, non-stop coverage of death and mayhem. But still, it felt smaller in comparison to the earthquake in Haiti. I guess back then I didn’t have Twitter and I had just been getting into Facebook. Now we’re drowning in this kind of information.

But wasn’t the tsunami a greater disaster affecting more people than the earthquake in Haiti? You bet your ass, but I don’t remember calls for donations from everyone and their mother. I do remember plenty of campaigns, but these were people that had direct ties to the affected countries, so I could understand their need to solicit aid.

Putting things in perspective, take a look at the List of Natural Disasters by Death Toll on Wikipedia. The tsunami registered as the 9th deadliest ever, and it’s the only one to happen in the 21st century, yet I feel that Haiti is getting more airtime and more support than South Asia ever did.

And let’s move past the tsunami. How many people do you know that donated to the people in New Orleans when Katrina hit? Just because they’re in a developed nation, does that prevent them from receiving your help or foreign aid? Instead, we just watched from our TV screens as their city was submerged and lives uprooted. Sure, the death toll didn’t even reach 2,000 people, but they deserve your support too.

To put things in perspective, in 2005 there was an earthquake in Kashmir which killed over 85,000 people. I remember hearing about it on the news because I watched the nightly news back then. How many people donated to them? They’re not as poor as the Haitians but I bet they’re pretty damn poor. Lucky for the Haitians that they’re geographically closer to the USA and Canada, right? And what about the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan, China that killed 70,000? Admittedly now I’m just pulling numbers out of a list.

From a utilitarian (and some would say heartless) perspective, we shouldn’t be allocating such a large sum of money to benefit the Haitians. What a heartless thing to say! But let’s analyze the numbers. Looking at the List of Causes of Death by Rate from Wikipedia, you can see that there are many types of preventable illnesses that kill several times the number of Haitians per year. I’m no doctor, so I’ll pick the ones I know. Diarrhea kills 1.8 million per year while malaria kills 1.1 million per year. Together they kill 2.9 million people per year. And you know what it takes to prevent diarrhea from killing people? Salt, water, and sugar. What about malaria? Fucking bug nets. And the list goes on.

In conclusion to my multi-directional rant, I’m going to say this – I really feel sorry for Haiti. It does suck for such an economically impoverished nation to be hit by such a natural disaster. At the same time though, for those that have donated money, why have you donated money to that cause? Do you have a vested interest in the country? If you do, I feel for you and understand your donation. But if you don’t, why donate to Haiti? Why not donate to the an organization working to prevent diarrhea? Your dollar will go a lot farther than in Haiti. It’s certainly not the immediacy of it because there are people dying of those preventable causes right now – approximately 57 per second by diarrhea alone. And I certainly hope it’s not because it’s the “it” thing to do right now, because if it is, then I hope that through my brutal honesty (along with my sobering heartlessness) I’ve been able to put things in perspective.

Thanks for reading to the end. I’m sure the first half of this blog doesn’t connect well with the second half. As well, if I read this blog through and through, um… I’d be confused as hell as well. I wish I took more English classes. There, I said it. Well, ones that didn’t focus on Shakespeare.