prices posts

The warning came in April 2009, a Starbucks representative tells me: during the analyst call to review the second fiscal quarter results for 2009. CEO Howard Schultz issued the bland-seeming statement, saying price "fine-tuning" would occur, "minor changes that will lower prices on some of our popular items such as tall lattes and slightly increased prices on our larger and more complex beverages." But last week, a series of new price increases were unrolled, hitting customers who ask for extra espresso shots, additional flavored syrups, or soy milk substitutes hard.

In New York and Canada, all the specialty drinks became more expensive, including (yup) the tall latte, by 5-10%. Regular drip coffee did adjust downward by about 10 cents in most markets; tea went up everywhere, significantly, but this was in connection with the roll out of new, more premium looseleaf tea sachets.

Tea has long been considered both a drink imparting many health benefits and -- even better -- a relative bargain. Due to a new move from Starbucks, those days are numbered.

I remember well so many times in business school, when a study group would meet at the cafe at a Barnes & Noble or at a Starbucks. Possessed of a hefty amount of student loans, but no vast pre-business school wealth (yep: many of my classmates were so lucky), I really had to pinch my pennies.

My go-to order was always tea; I could spend barely more than a dollar and perhaps feel flush enough to slip a quarter into the tip jar. I could sip my beverage and, if the discussion yawned on, ask for a refill on hot water gratis and guilt-free.

Even now that I'm a bona fide adult, I have three kids and this economy, so when I head to Starbucks for some alone time, I'm also budgeting for the cheapest drink on the menu. Tea? How perfect. The zen I need plus the price I can live with.

Remember the giddy year of 1999, when many of us were convinced we were entering the new millennium and everyone was panicking about the Y2K bug?

During the subsequent decade, the stock market made us rich as kings, then poor as church mice. We've taken a look back to see how the years have affected the price of 50 things we buy, or wish we could buy. Thanks to inflation, it takes around $1.30 to buy what $1 bought in 1999.

You'll note that some items, such as an iMac, a home mortgage and Hummel figurines are relative bargains compared to their 1999 prices. Others, however, such as a Superman comic book, a gallon of gas or a trip to the observation deck of the Empire State Building have skyrocketed.

Finding a cheap product is easy; finding a cheap product that isn't crap on the other hand can take quite a bit of research.

It's not uncommon to spend several hours looking for real opinions and reviews of good cheap products but thanks to Cheapism that's a thing of the past.

Cheapism's motto is, "We make the low price picks, you can make budget buys." They accomplish this by writing their own reviews of cheap products, delivering their findings in a straightforward and educational manner.

In a phone interview with WalletPop, Max Levitte, co-founder of Cheapism, told us that Cheapism is different from other review sites because of its "singular focus on low-cost goods and services and the interests of frugal consumers."

If you love to play video games but you haven't already purchased a Nintendo Wii then you better wait a few more days.

Nintendo announced today that its popular Nintendo Wii console will be $50 cheaper starting on Sunday.

The release also confirmed that when the latest Mario Bros game, "The New Super Mario Bros." comes out for the Wii in November that fans will get to play as the Mario Bros at the same time; a first for the series.

By dropping the Wii down to $199 Nintendo isn't just making it cheaper to get your motion sensing gaming on, it's matching the recent price drops to the Xbox 360 and the new slimmer Sony PlayStation 3.

Last month Microsoft cut the price of its top end Xbox 360, the Elite, to $299 which is even cheaper thanks to a $50 rebate which is valid until Oct. 6. The new PS3 slim which launched earlier this month is $299; a drop of $100.

This leaves the current prices of game consoles at:

• Nintendo Wii - $199
• Sony PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 3 Slim - $299
• Microsoft Xbox 360 Elite $249 after rebate
• Microsoft Xbox 360 Arcade - $199

One thing to remember when buying a new console is that if you're buying for a Christmas present you may want to wait a few weeks until Holiday Bundles come out. In the past these bundles have included two games, albeit older ones, for the same price as the consoles.

The only console that you may want to buy sooner than that is the Xbox 360 since the bundled games, Pure and Lego Batman, can be purchased used for less than the $50 rebate.

This one's still in rumor mode right now, but even all the experts say it's nearly a sure thing: TheStreet.com, says that AT&T is probably going to cut the price of the monthly iPhone usage plan by $10 this summer as Apple wheels out the phone's new model. That means the current, insultingly off-putting $69-a-month rate (combining the phone plan with data usage) will become a more moderately offensive $59 a month, which is a 14% price drop.

Space that $10-a-month savings over the lifetime of a two-year contract, and users will be saving $240, which is more than the $199 price of the most "basic" (hardly the word) iPhone. If customers can start thinking of the subscription price cut as paying for the device itself, lots more iPhones stand to get sold. Just ask early adopters of the iPhone, who paid $400 for their units, how they feel about the fact you can get one for half that now. Also ask Apple, which saw sales leap from 4 million to 17 million in one year after that price drop went into effect.

My family eats a huge amount of maple syrup, and lately, I've had to carefully budget our purchases. I have a whopping $50 per month set aside for sweeteners, and between the disappearance of bees and the rising prices of maple syrup, it doesn't go as far as you'd think.

Lately, maple syrup prices have skyrocketed. Last year was a terrible year for maple syrup, but what happened in 2007 was the real killer: Canadian reserves were exhausted (did you know there were maple syrup reserves? There are!) and prices went up 30%. So last year, when the season turned out terrible, prices went up steeply, 70% for some grades. Now maple syrup watchers (like me) are nervously wondering whether the 2009 season will make up for past seasons; and whether prices will, finally, go down.

Due to the overwhelming tightening of supply and the increase in prices, Cracker Barrel went to 55% maple syrup and 45% cane syrup in its "100% Pure Natural Syrup" at its Old Country Store restaurants; a move the company insisted was not at all motivated by cost, but by supply (hmmm, really? nothing to do with cost?).

The Dow isn't the only thing shrinking as fast as your net worth; magazines have also been slimming down in recent months. Even Blender, which had always ran a song quote on its spine has given it up as it moves to fewer pages and a smaller binding. Blender isn't alone with the overall number of ad pages shrinking by 17% compared to the 4th quarter of 2007! Even with magazine content remaining constant, with ad pages drops this high it's no wonder the page counts are shrinking.

I was shocked this summer when I saw the price of maple syrup virtually double in a few weeks' time. My family sweetens a lot of our food with maple syrup as we are working to reduce overly processed foods in our diet. At the time, I didn't know exactly why, but I've just been schooled in the world of maple syrup prices, and I've drawn some hypothesis about forecasting food pricing in general as a result.

Maple syrup is (unsurprisingly) dominated by Canadian production. What was a surprise to me was that Canada's government holds oversupply from a prior year and (much like the U.S. government's oil reserves) dumps it onto the market the next year if it is required. Due to a few years of low production due to weather, the Canadian government depleted its last bit of reserves sometime during 2007, and the price went sharply higher.

However, in the U.S., pricing isn't agreed upon in the way in which most commodities are; small suppliers negotiate one-on-one with small customers, in most cases. What's more, American production has steadily increased so that, in 2008, the U.S. was able to produce about 34% of Canadian production, giving the small suppliers an ever-larger impact on the world's prices.

The economic prediction of the owner of Tillinghast Maple: prices are about to start dropping as of the 2009 maple crop, if weather holds. The U.S. has more power and the reserve depletion of last year will have evened out. And I wonder if this model, of small farmers negotiating with small customers (kind of a farmer's market model, hmmm?) will have ever-greater impact on the U.S. market as customers more and more choose to buy local, shop in co-ops and farmer's markets, and buy produce and meat from CSAs and other direct relationships. Could little guys save the food economy? It's worth hoping.

Just before Christmas I wrote about how I was using super-human will power to wait till after the holiday to get a new flat screen TV. And I'm still waiting--thanks mainly to a suggestion from a reader named Dan. Prices are likely to fall further still after the Super Bowl. (Which is February first this year for those of you who care about football as much as I do.)

For years stores have targeted people who want a new TV for a Super Bowl party. According to USAToday, in 2007 stores sold 61% more TVs in the week before the Super Bowl than in the week before that. USAToday quoted NPD Group analysts figuring that Christmas sales spike because of sales (for gifts), but Super Bowl buyers want the top of the line.

The National Retail Federation said last year on CNNMoney that despite the recession, we would still buy 3.9 million TVs for the Super Bowl. Will we be so bold this year? The federation typically releases its projections at the end of January. I'd assume they'd be down. I'd also assume that the stores already know that and aren't going to over-order like fools. But that still leaves room--if you have the patience--to wait until the buying binge ends to go shopping.

Target wants to be sure it gets your holiday business this year. The retail giant has seen its profits take a nosedive this year, as shoppers cut back to just the essentials. Nearly half the store's revenue comes from nonessentials, though, like fashion and trendy housewares. To be sure they move items like this over the next month, Target will be offering some serious bargains.

The company says that it will match prices with its chief rival, Wal-Mart, in local markets, and will offer daily rotating value items on its website, while aggressively cutting prices on popular national brands. Though Target has cut prices around the holidays in previous years, Chief Executive Gregg Steinhafel says the company is really ramping up its promotions for 2008, and expects to be the price leader on many gift items.

This makes Target very attractive for holiday shoppers this year. I remember doing most of my shopping there last year anyway, and I saved myself 10% extra by opening the Target credit card on the day I spent $500 on gifts for my family. Then I paid it off and closed the account. If you can exercise discipline, there's no reason not to go for the in-store credit card offers, especially if you can take 10 or more percent off a large purchase. With the Target credit card profits dropping sharply recently, I wouldn't be surprised to see the store offer even better incentives to qualified applicants. Don't forget to check the website for those rotating value items, too.

Until this summer, I didn't consider a domestic flight a good deal unless it was under $100 for a one-way ticket. Since June, though, I know I'm lucky if I can find a flight anywhere that won't cost more than a mortgage payment.

A new study from USA Today shows exactly how much those prices have gone up because of fuel surcharges:

• Los Angeles to Bangkok -- up $352 over last year's fuel surcharge with a fuel surcharge of $542
• Washington, D.C to Tokyo -- up $400 over last year thanks to a $630 fuel surcharge
• New York to Dublin -- up $138 over last year because of a $230 fuel surcharge

Prices jumped sharply when jet fuel prices took off and airlines were forced to increase fuel surcharges in ticket fares. But now jet fuel is down sharply, comparable to last year's prices, yet the high prices remain all across the industry. What gives?


Outraged travelers accuse airlines of greed, but the airlines argue the surcharges are still necessary. A Northwest Airlines spokesperson says that prices "continue to exceed the surcharge levels in place," adding that many existing surcharges were not in place when oil was at its record high earlier this year. Other airlines say that the surcharges they were charging when jet fuel was at its high of $4.34 per gallon in July could not keep up with the costs to the airlines, so that now even though jet fuel is down below $2.40 per gallon, they are still trying to catch up with all the costs incurred over the summer.

We've all become a lot more interested in the secret science of what determines gas prices. The Cincinnati Enquirer just painstakingly analyzed price data from 716 gas stations in May and June using the Oil Price Information Service. Their most peculiar and potentially useful finding was that gas is cheapest on Tuesdays.

Over the whole period among all those stations, gas was an average three cents a gallon cheaper on Tuesdays than Wednesdays, and once it jumped 16 cents overnight. The Enquirer found that Wednesday was the day stations raised prices for the upcoming weekend, and that they lowered it just after the weekend.

The Enquirer says gas mavens have known this all along, though it was certainly news to me. If gas stations are expecting to even out their demand with pricing, will it work if people don't understand the weekly cycle? The story says: "Experts say gas always has been cheapest midweek, when demand is lowest. But the exact cheapest day is likely to change at any moment, without notice...." So, if we all start buying on Tuesdays, the cheapest day will move.

Also read

States with the best deal on gas

Tech help finding the best gas deals

I wrote blog post the other day for BloggingStocks which poked fun at Donald Trump for his attitude towards the big oil companies. Needless to say, that blog post garnered quite a bit of interest. One of our readers left a comment on that post which put forward a concept for selling gasoline which might merit some extra attention. That reader, identified as "gumbo koontz", suggests that gasoline be priced for individuals according to the fuel efficiency of the vehicle they drive. This idea may sound rather punitive or arbitrary, but I think it has a lot of valuable merit.

What better way could there be to make people really think about their fuel usage than to make their effect on the situation more personally tangible for them? As the driver of a full-sized pick-up truck, I'm not against the idea of paying five or six cents a gallon more for my gasoline that someone who chooses to drive a smaller, more fuel efficient vehicle. I do use my truck bed almost daily for various chores and payloads which a smaller vehicle couldn't touch, but the fact is that I use more gasoline to get from point A to point B. I can definitely see the merit in rewarding those drivers who trade off convenience for frugality.

How might a program like this work, and how could we administrate it accurately and fairly? Would it be viewed as punishment for those who use more gasoline or as reward for those who use less? Could it be administered at the pump or would it have to be handled with the government through the submission of forms and records? These are just a few of the questions which would need to be answered before a program like this could be made real.

In the blistering summer heat, everyone enjoys watermelon. It was a staple during my childhood and it is one of the most fun fruits for kids to eat. Watermelon is huge, drips everywhere and you can have seed spitting contests. What's more fun for a kid than making a mess? However, if watermelon was expensive, I would have certainly grown up making a mess with other fruits.

Recently a Densuke watermelon fetched $6,100 at an auction in Japan. This is one of the most expensive melons ever sold in Japan, and I would have to imagine the rest of the world as well. At 17 pounds the cost of the fruit was about $359 per pound. I think that's more than I would fetch at an auction. For comparison, it's equivalent to 122 pounds of Godiva Dark Chocolate Truffles. This price isn't even much of a shocker for Japan where a pair of cantaloupe melons sold for $23,500 last month.