My syndicated Super-Couponing Tips column for the week is entitled “Are money-savers cheapskates who sacrifice quality?“
Here’s an excerpt:
“You only seem concerned with the bottom line of how cheap something is. Paying the lowest price should not be your only goal. Do you not realize some things are worth investing in for longevity’s sake? Your generation treats many things as disposable. It is always better to buy something of excellent quality that will last instead of something bargain priced and shoddy.“
Read this entire column at the Napa Valley Register.
My Super-Couponing Tips column appears in newspapers around the country to a weekly readership of over 20 million people! Learn more about my column’s syndication at this link.
Miss a column? Here’s an archive of all of my past columns I’ve shared on the blog.
wolverine70 says
Wow! ‘Your generation’?!? I mean, I know you look like you’re 19, Jill, but if she reads your column you’d think she’d know you’re a Mom with an adult daughter. She accused the lady who keeps her luggage wheels viable with duct tape of not keeping things going for the long haul?
Coupon Maven says
Ha ha! If there are two things I’ve learned over the years of writing this column, it’s that 1) My column audience is often very different than my blog audience, and you can never assume they’ve read things on the blog if they are only reading me in the paper; and 2) My print audience tends to slant much older.
This 19-year-old (who’s closer to being a 50-year-old than a 20-something) thanks you for your kind words :) Looks like the link is fixed now too.
As for the duct tape suitcase wheel, that thing lasted a long time! Over the rest of 2018 into 2019, the other wheel started to fall apart — it had a rubber coating on it that finally rotted away. Without one good wheel, it wasn’t rolling so well, and we finally retired it. Had it been a standard size wheel that I could actually find anywhere, I would have replaced them both. :)
wolverine70 says
BTW, the Napa link here went to last weeks column. Might be an issue at the paper though.
Margaret Harvey says
My father used to say you get what you pay for. I find this especially true with discount furniture. It simply doesn’t last.
Coupon Maven says
Very, very true. We just went through the mattress purchasing process (which I will blog about as soon as I get a chance – there is so much to be wary of now as there are a lot of really poorly-made mattresses out there!) and quality and longevity were at the top of our want list. We are now looking to replace our living room couches. Ahh, the joys of everything in the house wearing out at about the same time :)
QueenKitty says
Hi Jill
When my neighbor’s glass top table took a flip in a wind storm and she had thousand of pieces of safety glass in the cracks of her deck, it was when we decided to always remove our umbrella unless we were using it and then my husband put white PVC caps and drilled a hole in them and screwed them to the deck and then put a screw in the sides of the legs so our table doesn’t go anywhere. Problem solved!
Coupon Maven says
That is a great idea! The umbrella is definitely a thing we didn’t think about. Ours was not open when the table went over — it was closed, and the base was bolted into a 40lb. concrete umbrella stand. The wind still toppled the entire thing over. So now we remove our (also new) umbrella every single time we’re done using it. The new cultured stone table came from Menards, and it weighs 75 pounds! It is a heavy sucker, for sure.
We do move it around the deck, so bolting it down wouldn’t be the answer, but hopefully with the umbrella out most of the time, and the weight of the table, it won’t be as susceptible to blowing over.
And yes, I never want to clean up those thousands of tiny pea-gravel-sized pieces of safety glass EVER again :) We used a Shop Vac to get most of it, but when I re-stained our deck, I found even more pieces in the cracks between the wood.