Deals

Last week, everywhere you looked, that was all you could see - "deals". 50% off this, 75% off that, buy one and get one free, all kinds of stuff to mislead the consumer. It was so tempting to get 50% off stuff, especially when everyone tells you that this is the time of the year to be shopping, the time of the year when the best deals are available. So I went out shopping too, thinking the deals would only be available on that day.

I found yesterday that Macys, the store that advertises and makes use of Black Friday to the maximum has another sale this weekend - with the same 50% off of course. So what were they advertising about last week? What made last week the best week to shop?

In fact, come to think of it, although Macys has good stuff, the pricing is very misleading. There is no "real" price on any item - its basically an auction model, where the goods come in before the beginning of each season (sales for the next season begins way before the season itself, off) at heavy prices. The people who are particular about wearing in season and the latest fashion trends and colors buy those at exorbitant prices. After a while, the same items get marked down, and they have a sale, perhaps putting a discount of 40%. If you are unlucky, you could be paying as much as 40% more for the same item if you went shopping just one day before the sale day. And what happens when the items dont go on sale even after 40% discount? Well, they get marked down lower still. Finally it hits clearance, and they usually cost between 5-10$ at that point. Of course, one has to realize that the ones that end up in clearance are the sizes that no one can wear, the patterns that no one liked, or the cuts that did not suit most people. So the trick to shopping well is to go after it is marked down, but before people have finished buying up all the good pieces. And that is why sales are so popular here.. 

Except... what does it mean when there is a sale every 10 days or so? Are they reducing the price of items every 10 days? Isnt that an indication that their items are way overpriced to begin with? And if the store is not going bust after all these sales, surely they are conning us into paying more than we ought to?

A programming class that I took at Columbia had this interesting problem we had to solve : We had to write code that could play scrabble - we all started out with an initial (random) set of letters. In each round, a new letter would come up for bidding, and all the teams could bid on this new letter to try and get the letter (and win the game by making a 7 letter word). So at each point, when a letter came up for bid, we had to decide what that letter was worth to us and bid accordingly. Through trial and error, we learnt that the only way to get what was valuable through an auction was to put in a bid that reflected the true value of the letter for us depending on the state of our game.

Of course, estimating true value was a difficult problem. We knew intuitively what letters were more valuable or less valuable. But putting a number on it was not easy. We explored all kinds of things to arrive at true value. We never reached the right equations, and our player did not win, ultimately. But it was a valuable lesson, because I am applying it while shopping at Macys now :) .. I look at each piece and decide whether the cost reflects its true value to me. If it does, I buy, and if it doesnt, I dump it. It has proved to be a valuable aid in helping avoid regrets.

Funny how programming lessons can come handy while shopping.

Why I dont want to be a Domestic Goddess

I care a lot about what I eat, and so I subscribe to a number of food blogs. These blogs are maintained by similar food enthusiasts, who try out different recipes from different sources and then reproduce the recipe word for word in their blog along with pictures of the result. Many of them also quote their recipe source. When I first came to the US, I had one of these blogs too. I lost interest in it soon after I realized what a waste of time and effort it was. Besides, I stopped having much free time at hand too. But thats not the what I wanted to write about... one of the blogs I read had a recipe for a dessert which was sourced from a book named "How to be a Domestic Goddess".  The name caught my eye, and since I had given some thought to the whole idea of what good house keeping was, I decided to check out what this author thought was a successful homemaker.

What I found did not surprise me much. It was a book full of desserts. Every recipe seemed to have the same sets of ingredients in various ratios - all purpose flour, sugar, eggs and butter. And then a few other ingredients would be added -perhaps strawberry, pista, coconut etc, to add color and vary the flavor. Much like how they do for ice creams. There was not even one recipe I would consider an every day recipe. And there lies the probelm. Somehow, as a society, we seem to think that good housekeepers are those who can cook foods that resemble products from a bakery or a restaurant. The whole concept of "homemade" seems to be twisted out of form, with many bakeries professing to provide goods that resemble "homemade" and many homes trying hard to imitate the bakeries. One wonders here, who is imitating who? I know some food bloggers who bake a cake again and again and again until it looks just perfect, so they can photograph it, and then end up eating all the different versions. I wonder what makes them do that. What is so "homemade"y about buying industrial products such as all purpose flour and refined sugar and mixing them together with a stand mixer and baking it in an oven that looks like it belongs in a bakery? Arent you just recreating a bakery at home? And why is that a good thing?

For years, I thought cakes were great. Now things have changed, I am all about cooking foods that can be eaten everyday. Well, I mean food that can be eaten everyday without worrying about going overweight or developing heart disease. In some sense I am sort of trying to go back to cooking the way they were doing it in the pre industrial era. I dont know where I got this notion that pre industrial diets were better for health.. perhaps it is this book I read about indigenous diets and how they can prevent disease that was written by a doctor who travelled to different parts of the world to find out what the health secrets of various indigenous people were. She chose 7 different places in the world which she found were "cold spots" for certain modern diseases such as breast cancer, depression, diabetes, heart disease etc. At first she was trying to find something common through all the diets to figure out what we could recreate to achieve the same health benefits. What she found however was that there was no secret ingredient - the indigenous people ate both vegetarian and non vegetarian depending on where they were from. For example, in iceland, people mostly ate fish, while in mexico, the diet was corn, rice and beans. The indigenous people were sometimes overweight, but they showed no symptoms of the kinds of diseases that is common in most developed and developing regions. The conclusion she drew from all of this was that it was cooking and eating traditional recipes, which seemed to be complete and balanced that kept them in good health. So the answer in the end was simple - try and cook the meals your great grand mother made, from the scratch. And make sure you combine foods the way she told you they must be combined...

Gee.. long story. What I am really trying to say is... I think at some point we lost our traditional knowledge of what keeps us healthy and what does not, and ended up looking to corporations and businesses for ideas on what the right thing to eat was. And it resulted in us slowly changing out diets until it became the mess it is today. Dont believe me? Look at some of ads they show on TV... Just a few days ago, while I was reimaging my laptop, I happened to wander around the office and watch some commercials on TV. The first one was for pizza. And the next one was a stool softener. So first the businesses market their foods to you and make you ruin your bowels, and right after that, another business tries to set your stomach right with some more artificially ingested chemicals. I wonder why there are no ads which say..."The only thing you have to do to make sure you are "regular" is to eat the right a balanced and complete home cooked meal".

Hmm this is getting to be a long rant, so I guess I will stop now. Either way, I dont ever want to be a domestic goddess and ruin my bowels.

Shopping - Culture

So far, I used to think of ads as a means by which you come to know of a product / service. I never gave it more thought than that. But if you look more closely, you can look at the ads in general that are shown in a country and get a sense of its prevailing culture. If you look at ads in India, especially the ads that are targeted at women - such as the oils, soaps, cooking ranges or other household electronics, you will notice that the ad shows a whole family and how the woman is able to take care of her in laws, husband and kid better because of this new product. Some ads show the husband and kids playing outside and coming back in with dirty clothes and the woman taking it all with a big smile because she has this new soap with some "proactive" ingredients that will clean everything effortlessly. Similar concepts show up for washing machines too. For oils it shows the woman taking care of the health of the older people in her family. Ads for other products use family too - for example, some product that is supposed to reduce acidity in the stomach shows a big family gathering and people eating a lot and then someone using this product to reduce acidity. I dont know if "family based advertising" has gone down after I left India. I never seem to get time to watch much of TV when I go back there now. But it definitely used to be based a lot on families. I guess the ads are sort of targeted at our psyche that wants the big happy family life. 

The other big class of ads in India are targeted at younger women who are not yet married. For them, it is all about fairness creams and lotions. And that ads invariably show these girls using some or the other product and as a result getting married to a handsome man in a lavish wedding. And of course, that must be the best way to sell anything (similar concepts show up for almost all fairness creams, sometimes for soaps, very often for sarees, and of course, for jewellery), because every girl wants the lavish wedding and the handsome man. As soon as she gets married, I guess she is considered to fall into the other category where she should be taking care of the whole family.

In the US though, the whole family is rarely shown. Women's products are shown a lot, but it seems to only show "earlier" and "later" or just a woman with skimpy clothes looking very made up and surreal. The ads show women of all color and race, and I have not yet seen an ad show what effect the product had on her social life.  Is this because "family" wont sell here? In fact, the only product for which I seem to notice "family" come into the picture is for medicines and restaurants. Some medicine ads show people able to enjoy a family outing because they are taking medication. Does it mean people here only become aware of families when they fall ill? Some restaurants show the whole family eating junk food together. What does get shown most often however is stuff like "Shop until you drop" or "Maxinista / Fashionista" or being "in season", as though having all the latest and best things is an achievement in itself. It seems based on the premise that women will keep buying stuff whether they need it or not. And it does not seem to serve any purpose, other than being fashionable. That makes me wonder if all American women are really like that - do they only care about buying more stuff and presenting themselves with "new looks" every day? No other goals in life? 

Appearances...

While on the train one day, I noticed a woman reading a magazine. I was amazed at the number of ads that contained women in them - I would have thought one wouldnt put women on it, because that would mean you would attract only the men with the ad, and not the women. But if so many ads have women on it, perhaps it is targeting both men and women.

And the other trait I noticed was that all the women had perfect bodies. Each one looked like a gym instructor, and they all wore skimpy clothes. Sitting in India, when you read articles about how ads are "objectifying women" it always sounds funny. Here though, it all starts to look real. Women do look at the ads, and they do try to look like that. I have seen some how spend a long time in front of the mirror trying and re trying to tie their hair and then pull out strands so as to get the I-dont-care-what-my-hair-looks-like look. Others pull their shirts out and let it hang with just the right amount of carelessness. There really is nothing so very casual about "casual" anymore. Casual is a very carefully pulled together look with the entire outfit coordinated according to style and color. It takes just as much time doing that as it does to get dressed formally. But I digress...

What I really want to talk about is how everyone wants to be the skinny girl in shorts and a tank top. And being in NY, thats all you really see. Really. I mean, at least dont they want to wear something different from the other girl? Why does everyone want only white during the summer? And everyone is in black tights and boots in the winter. Worse, even if you were looking for something else, you wouldnt find them, because shops only carry what they think are "in season". So much for variety and inventiveness.

There are so many unwritten rules about dressing here. Women who wear long skirts are always "old". Young women wear short skirts that show as much leg as possible. Only old women wear high necked blouses. So the high necked blouses always come in dull grey or beige or brown. The bright colors are for young women, and they come with plunging necklines. Whoever said older women dont like colors, btw? And why shouldnt young women dress with some modesty? I hate the way the shops assume things about everyone. Why wont they make anything for the stray cases who dont think like the mainstream? 

Soda drinking Infants

When I first came here, I was naive and innocent about food - in my world, one simple bought ingredients from the person selling it for the lowest price, brought it home, cooked and ate it. So when I first went to the stores here, I would naturally pick the cheapest vegetables, cheapest milk and cheapest meat. It took me a while to understand that America's shops operate differently compared to Indian ones and that I would have to change my shopping behaviour to buy healthy foods.

It took me a long while to understand how everything here is "mass produced", and what the effects of such production were. Most of what I learnt, I learnt through websites that may or may not have been right. So finally, I bought a book named " Fast food nation".

It is interesting, especially if the kind of food that is available here exasperates you. There have been so many times when we were on a roadtrip when I wanted to eat some "real" food and found that fast food was the only option available everywhere. We would end up buying loads of fruits from some local supermarket before starting off on trips later on. Eitherway, fast food nation has lots of details on how the fast food industry came to be what it is today. One of the details given there was about the advertising by big brands. For example, companies get funding from corporations such as McDonald's to advertise on their behalf - say there was a bottle maker that wanted to sell a bottle for X amount of money. Corporations like Mcdonald's give them money to put their logo on it before selling. The bottle making company is obviously making a profit, and McDonald's is doing their advertising which eventually translates into more business for them. Apparently putting these logos on infant's milk bottles makes them more receptive to the logo later on in life. Another fact mentioned in the book was that many infants start drinking soda instead of milk.

I did not believe that last part at all, at least not until I saw it myself. I thought, which parent would give their children soda instead of milk? One of my relatives had come home with their one year old son. The little guy could walk and could say a few words. A perfectly normal, perhaps slightly hyperactive child. After dinner, the mother wanted to drink soda - she said it was good for digestion! Well as soon as the mother drank soda, the child started asking for it, and was only satisfied after he got it. What surprised me even more was the promptness with which the mother gave it to the kid. For me that action is the height of carelessness.. but for her it was just another normal food item that she was sharing with her son.

Thats when I realized that many parents do not understand why soda is bad. They do not realize that they are sowing the seeds for a life long consumption pattern, so they feel it is ok for the child to drink soda when they want it. What this results in are children with an addiction to sugared water who will grow up and argue with you that diet coke is 0 calories and so one it is just like drinking water. (Which was the reason given by one of my plump coworkers for having about 4 sodas a day while being on a diet).

What can I say.. our lifestyles have changed so much, so irrevocably.  In India, rich people are almost always fat. Well, at least the ones who are not movie stars. Poor people, on the other hand, have perfect figures. I remember a bus ride I once took in which some gypsy women got into the bus somewhere near Jayanagar. I stared at them for a while, because their bodies had a grace and strength that one does not see often. My mother was with me, and when we got off the bus, she too remarked that they had perfectly sculpted bodies. We had a conversation around this and concluded that the rich people eat rich food and do no work and therefore get fat. And the poor people eat fat free foods and do a lot of physical labor and therefore stay in shape. When I came here, it was the exact opposite trend that I saw. The rich ones here are always in shape. They eat organic. They go to gyms. They buy from local farmers markets. They avoid plastic. The poor on the other hand eat McDonalds and dunkin donuts and jack in the box. They go to walmart and cannot afford gyms. If you think about it, it actually makes sense in their world to do what they do - because buying raw materials and cooking a meal often costs more time as well as money than just buying a burger from McDonald's. Thus the poor end up being fat and unhealthy here.

Today I look at fast food chains with a little bit of fear. They have exhausted their possibilities for expansion in the developed countries and are opening shops in places like India and China. Right now the prices are high enough that the local competition there can survive. The corporations will however eventually find a way to subsidize the cost of those items enough to close down competition, like they have done everywhere else. That could eventually lead to a situation where through out the length and breadth of India, we will only get hamburgers. And our children would be drinking soda instead of milk. I hope we have enough sense left in us as a people to not let that happen to us.

Good Doctors...

People in India lament about the difficulty of finding good doctors there. The usual assumption made is that all the good medical students emigrate to the US, resulting in only the not so good ones being left behind there. Having lived there for 25 years, I have been to at least a dozen doctors. Barring a few trusted ones that we know are good, almost every new trial was a disaster. 

The one that is clearly at the top of my memory was when my brother fainted after eating something extremely hot. We were worried that he might have had head injury during the fall, so our family doctor asked us to visit another physician - this guy was supposedly a specialist. This specialist made my brother take an EEG, took one look at it, and asked me and my mother to come to another room, for a "confidential" talk. He then proceeded to tell us that my brother had epilepsy, that he should be put under strong medication for two and a half years, that it would affect his studies, and perhaps the rest of his life. We were both shocked, because there had been no signs of anything like epilepsy before that. The doctor was ready to prescribe the medicines and start off with the treatment, and we took the prescription and went back home, sullen.. My brother at that point was a really good student, and it was heartbreaking to think he wouldnt be what he was anymore because of these medications. 

After getting back home, we had a discussion with my father, who was thankfully less emotionally disturbed. He calmly suggested that we meet another specialist. This time around, we decided it had to be someone who was recommended by people. We went to the new doctor, he examined my brother, and said everything was completely normal. We were confused, and on giving a print out of the older eeg which contained the "abnormality" he immediately laughed and said, oh, the boy must have gone to sleep while the eeg was taken! 

To think that this doctor from a fairly reputed hospital suggested we put my brother on chemicals that cause changes to the brain outrages me even now. I wonder how they can care so little about making such a diagnosis. Did this doctor consider the possibility that it might be wrong at least once? Why didnt he wait for another such occurrence? Why didnt he ask about past history? Why didnt he try to take the eeg once more? Any one of these questions might have pointed the doc in the right direction.... Worst of all, why had he never observed the eeg of another patient who went to sleep during the process when0?

My brother has had no other fainting episodes. And yes, he was school topper in 10th cbse exams, in a fiercely competitive school.  

This is not the only bad doctor I have been to. There have been many... so I believed the assumption that all good doctors were here... until I actually went to some doctors here. 

Last week I noticed that I was hearing considerably lesser from my left ear. There was also some pain when I burped. I first tried to get ear wax out with a q-tip, then tried pouring some ear-ache drops inside and so on. Nothing helped. Finally, after three days of trying to wish this thing away, I went to a doctor. He looked and immediately said, oh, you just have ear wax, we shall clean that out right now... 

He first tried pouring hydrogen peroxide solution into my ear. This is H2O2, so it dissociates into water and O2 and produces this fizzing sound in your ear, pretty much like cola. I didnt mind, so I lied down and waited for it to do its thing. The only thing that confused me was that I had seen paraffin used to do this, instead of H2O2. After giving the H2O2 about 20 minutes to work, the doc came back and said he would rinse my ear. The rinsing was done with a syringe, and wasnt at all comfortable. He then asked if I felt like everything was gone. Nothing had cleared, and I said so. He looked in my ear again, said, oh, theres more. And again poured H2O2 and left for another 20 minutes. And again tried rinsing the ear with water. This time, he also tried to use a qtip to fish the wax out. He apparently tried too hard, because it hurt me quite a bit and I cried out in pain. He told me there was more of the stuff left inside. (In fact, almost nothing had come out). He then gave me the H2O2 solution, and asked me to go and try it myself, at home. He also told me that I could try to fill my ears with water while taking a shower.

I went home and dutifully tried it, with no results. Finally, after about 2-3 days of trying this, I called my father. He told me that H2O2 will dissociate into plain water, and that it will likely not dissolve ear wax, and that he didnt understand why it was poured into my ear to clear out wax. He suggested that I use paraffin. 

All this while, I continued to be unable to hear out of my left ear... I next searched on the internet and found that H2O2 was used for cleaning out ear wax. I even performed an experiment to ensure that it dissolved wax - I fished some wax out of the ear with a Qtip and put it in H2O2 and watched the wax disappear. So I decided that pouring the H2O2 should remedy my problem, and continued to pour more and more of it in the ear - with no results. 

Finally, about a week after I had lost hearing, I went to another doctor. This time, it was a specialist, and looking at his office, I was sure I would get treated with one of those fancy looking equipments. Thats exactly what happened - but it solved my problem, and it took under 5 minutes to finish the whole thing and walk out. What he had was a vaccum pump. He put the thing in my outer ear and used suction, and all the wax came out, with minimal discomfort for me. And later, because I was a little uncomfortable with this vaccum cleaning thing, he cleared out the ear with some water - this time it really did bring wax out - and that was it! All the wax was gone, I could hear clearly, and the pain was gone too!

Good docs are hard to find. Here as well as at home.

How to react when you get poor customer service

Very often, we get treated poorly by certain businesses - they dont explain what they are doing with our money, they dont charge fairly, their quality is poor - whatever. Well, here are some instances where I got bad service and decided to never go back. I would say every customer should do the same thing, just so that people who dont put the customers first will go out of business, and do that quickly.

During the peak of the 2008 recession, there were strong rumors that ICICI would close down, and I, worried that the little bit of money that I had accumulated in just 5 months of working would disappear if I left it with the bank, went personally to the bank to withdraw the amount when the ATM did not work. When I put in my request, I was treated with a curt "no". The lady at the counter would not even make eye contact with me after this "no". I was taken aback because they had fought with two other banks to get me to open my account with them- until then, I was always welcomed, given lots of investment options, talked to politely, and generally treated well. I understand it was a difficult time for them, but they could have treated me slightly better, because it was my money they were talking about, and not theirs. I finally said "Thank you", and walked away, irritated. I resolved that day that when this crisis was over I would transfer my money and close down that account - it took me four months to get that done, but it did happen, and I have never since walked into an ICICI bank.

When I first moved to the US, we were in a studio apartment in a luxury rental named Liberty Towers. I had until then lived in a fairly large house, so the concept of a studio was something of a shock to me, but worse than that was the attitude of the management of the building. My husband had taken the studio at the rate of a 1 bedroom apartment, because the management had told him that there were no 1 bedrooms available at the time he rented this apartment. He had told them he would be getting married, and that a studio would not be enough. The management made him sign a lease for a studio, and gave a "verbal" agreement that they would give him a 1 bedroom as soon as one became available. Poor hubby completely did not understand the deviousness of the whole thing, and he kept asking them for the 1 bedroom. Each time, they would show him something, and quote a rent that was way more than the $2375 we were paying, and tell him this was all that was available. He waited, and we got married, and I moved into the studio, and we were still not able to get the 1 bedroom. Meanwhile, I started to notice that a lot of the apartments were empty, and so there could not have been an "unavailability" of 1 bedroom apts. So we finally asked one of our friends to come and ask for the rates for 1 bedrooms, and lo and behold, they were available cheaper than our studio! It was just that they were just not available when we asked for it, because the guy wanted us to shell out even more than what we were already paying. There really was nothing we could do - breaking our lease meant we would have to pay a penalty of 2 months of rent, so we decided to live in the apt. until the lease ran out. Meanwhile, we also got acquainted with another couple who had leased just before us, and who got a 1 bedroom cheaper than our studio, on a higher floor! It was so clear we were being ripped, and it was sad to know there was nothing to be done about it. In any case, we finally came to the end of our lease term, and moved out of there, and have never gone back since.

And then there are the services that talk very well, but try to cheat you covertly :

 A few days ago, we booked a car for two days - the cost was supposed to be around $250 for the two days. The booking was made online, and we received an email confirmation about the reservation soon after. While returning the car though, we noticed that the bill was over $300. Confused, my husband asked why this happened, and the person helping him explained that the charge that was in the email was pre tax, and this was the amount we had to pay after tax. My husband pulled out the email confirmation, which stated that $250 was after tax, and asked him to remove the additional tax. The guy then backed down and cancelled the second tax and allowed us to finish the transaction.

Just yesterday, we noticed that we were charged over $100 for being late by 2-3 days on a credit card payment, despite this being the first such late payment. What was interesting was that about half of it appeared on one bill as finance fees, and the other half on another bill as some other fees. It took a while to figure out that in total we had to pay this amount for the 4 days that we got late. After talking to customer service however, we managed to get the charge waived - apparently as a gesture of good will. 

In both these cases, I cannot say I got poor customer service - my problem was solved when I called them up, but the point is that there should have been no problem in the first place. So these guys will get my "not preferred, but will make do with it if I have no choice" rating. 

Can I remember someone who gave me exceptional service?

 A salesman for Maui Divers Jewelery who sold me a single South Sea Pearl floater worth $200 - that purchase made me feel really special, and I felt I had paid just what the piece was worth - the man did not try to make me buy something more expensive, did not try to sell me another piece, did not try to say that the pearls I had already were bad. He just was a nice guy trying to help me pick something I loved. I really felt grateful to him for that, and it is not often that one remembers people one buys jewelry from so vividly.

 Another salesman who sold me a pair of Maui Jim sunglasses - he also did not compel me to buy something I did not want, he showed me all the options he had, told me what was good with each one, helped me eliminate stuff I didnt like, and finally I ended up with a pair that I really use now.