Recently it was time again to haggle my cable bill (I still get a steady stream of success story comments on that post). Actually, I ended up just switching to DSL as I’d been having some ongoing speed issues with my cable internet. I’ll take the one-year discounted deal from DSL, and then when I go back to broadband cable I’ll sign up for whatever special offer they have then.

I’m not the only one. Here’s a Vox article “Here’s the secret to getting a lower cable bill” which supposedly talks to ex-Comcast customer service reps and offers the following tips:

• “It pays to play hardball,” says a customer service representative who worked at an Oregon call center from 2002 to 2009. “Threatening to cancel will get you further than outright asking for a discount.”
• Asking to talk to a manager could actually backfire, as managers may not be judged based on customer satisfaction metrics like regular customer reps. You just want to reach retention specialists.
• People in Comcast’s “retention” department are rewarded based on their success at getting you to keep your service without giving you a big discount. So they’re going to do their best to get you to change your mind for free.
• Retention specialists only have a limited number of discounts to hand out to folks. If you can’t seem to get one, that specific person might not have any left. Call back and try again and you might get someone with discounts left. But don’t call too many times, as they track your calls.

And here is a Business Insider video with basically the same idea, but maybe the nice production value will convince you that haggling is a legitimate customer tool. 😉 As Wayne Gretzky said, “You miss one hundred percent of the shots you don’t take.” Your mega-corp internet provider won’t just hand you a discount worth $100+, but they might if you just ask.

With the announcement of Target Subscriptions, I wanted to run a quick price check to see how it stacks up with competitors Amazon.com and Diapers.com. We’re expecting another baby, so we’ll be needing lots of diapers soon (cloth just didn’t happen). Below is a chart of prices, data table, and recap. All shopping methods offer free shipping unless otherwise stated. Prices are as of May 6th, 2014.

Recap and Notes

• Diapers.com has some good new customer promotions (currently $10 off first case, 20% off for 3 months on auto-delivery). However, on an ongoing basis their prices appear more expensive than Amazon or Target.
• Amazon Subscribe & Save with Amazon Mom technically offers the cheapest price, but you’ll need Amazon Mom (free trial) and thus Amazon Prime. Amazon Mom gives 20% off all diapers and wipes, and you can get 20% other Subscribe and Save items with Mom if you reach at least 5 subscription items per month. (If you just have 5 items and no Prime/Mom, you get 15% off.) As of right now, that isn’t a problem for us as we use it every month. Keep in mind that Amazon is always fiddling with pricing so it’s wise to keep an eye on them.
• Target subscription prices are generally competitive, but don’t appear to beat Amazon significantly and their selection is still much more limited. I did include a line with the 5% off with Target REDcard discount, but note that you can also use a rewards-earning credit card at Amazon.
• Sales tax is another consideration, as Target may charge sales tax in your state while Amazon may not if it doesn’t have a physical presence in your state. Amazon is gradually starting to charge sales tax in most states, however.

In 2007 I wrote about a site called Farecast.com that used past data to offer a prediction on whether airfares would rise or fall in the future. I even used it to book tickets a couple times. It was soon bought and absorbed by Bing Travel (Microsoft) for $115 million in 2008 and but it has recently been killed off and is no longer available. In a recent FiveThirtyEight.com article, Kaiser Fund tested out Kayak.com’s own price prediction tool. It wasn’t a broad survey – he tracked 32 different requests and tracked the prices until Kayak said to buy. Here are the results:

Out of those 32 requests, 17 resulted in immediate buy recommendations. Out of the remaining 15 that told him to wait at least one day, he eventually saved money only on 5 of them. Averaging out all the final purchase prices, they were actually 2% higher than if he just bought immediately. Fung qualifies his results by saying that even though it’s technically a draw, the tool can help those people who would otherwise second-guess their decisions.

Given that there is only one price predictor tool left and it doesn’t really seem to work all that well, I come to a different conclusion. I plan to take this knowledge and simply buy my tickets whenever the price is acceptable, saving both time and worry.

Shopping for a new mattress bed is confusing and annoying. Sadly, that’s exactly how it was designed to be. This Slate article talks about this maddening process and offers a few tips:

1. Mattress makers intentionally hinder comparison shopping by selling the exact same product with unique names for each individual store.
2. Higher coil counts are not a good indicator of quality. More coils may simply use thinner gauge metal wire.
3. Pillowtop foam materials are cheap and a huge source of profit. Mattress thickness is thus also not a good indicator of quality.
4. There is no evidence that box springs are necessary or even helpful, other than to raise the height.
5. Firmer is not always better for your back. You just don’t want it too soft or too firm. Each person needs to find their own optimal firmness level.

Also see: Consumer Reports

Our Mattress Shopping Experience

The last time we did frugal mattress shopping was 7 years ago. We ended up with a Simmons Beautyrest mattress from a Simmons World of Sleep mattress outlet. It was a mid-tier mattress with a super-thick pillow top layer and cost $700 while comparable mattresses were $1,500 and up. It was so high that we had trouble finding sheets big enough to fit it. (We were trying to replicate the Westin Hotel Heavenly Bed.) We liked that mattress a lot, but we decided to move it into the guest bedroom. Unfortunately, it appears that there are now only three such outlets remaining in the entire US – Atlanta, Dallas, and Seneca, SC.

We tried to buy a comparable Simmons mattress, but after visiting a few local showrooms I was so annoyed at the obfuscation and overall skeeziness that I just went to our local Costco and bought the only flavor available. The Sealy Posturepedic Newfield Cushion Firm Cal King set with two twin box springs cost $900. Not a bad price, but after just a week my back was hurting and the bed felt like it was sagging in the middle. We returned it to Costco and got our money back (though it took some effort to secure it on the top of my car). This route may work for some people, but the mattress was not for us.

I decided to go back to a Simmons mattress and looked into buying online. Check out this comparison chart from US-Mattress.com:

I am supposed to accept that they control the expected durable lifetime that finely between 11 and 17 years? “This mattress will last 13 years, but this will last 14 years”. Please. Even if they could, why would they bother with the extra engineering and assembly line tweaks involved. I bet the $700 mattress is exactly the same inside as the $1,150 mattress (both with 800 coil count, pocketed coils, edge foam encasement, blah blah blah). I considered just buying the $700 mattress ($879 for Cal King). My sister actually bought a mattress from US Mattress earlier in the year and was satisfied with the experience.

However, I ended up shopping locally at yet another “sale” and found what appeared to be a very similar Simmons Beautyrest Firm mattress for also around $850 for a Cal King. That way I was able to at least lie down on it and compare with others. We had a wooden mattress platform so we didn’t need a box spring and saved a few more bucks.

The final touch? We bought the NovaForm® 3″ Pure Comfort Memory Foam Mattress Topper for about $150. The reviews seem positive overall and after sleeping on it for a while we found it to be very comfortable. There was a little plasticky odor in the beginning but it disappeared quickly. The only real quibble is that it tends to shift on top of the bed and so you have to reposition it every so often. I’ve thought about spraying the bottom with hair spray or some sort of tacky adhesive to solve that problem. Otherwise, we like it even more than our previous mattress.

In the end, I like the idea of buying a firm mattress (the “bones”) separately from the padding material (a replaceable “skin”). Our 11″ firm mattress + 3″ memory foam topper meant a 14″ total height. Buying a 14″ pillowtop “luxury” mattress would have cost between $300 and $1,000 more and I doubt that we would be able to tell the difference.