WalletPop

This post is part of a series about real-life signs we're in a recession.

Move over Pampered Chef and Mary Kay. The latest in-home sales "party" concept has reversed the usual guest-to-rep cash flow. Instead of pixie-sized portions of a demonstration omelet, or a makeover that makes your dog bark at you when you get home, the new guest takeaway is cash.

So claim the many "gold party" services cropping up (curiously, overwhelmingly headquartered in Detroit). Companies like My Gold Party and Gold Party by ADI offer to help convert your friends' gold to cash, either by supplying you (for a fee) with the equipment and training for do-it-yourself appraisals or by sending a representative to your home who will set up shop in your kitchen.

Trading your bling-bling for cash is nothing new, of course. Many folks have turned to the jewelry chest when times are hard. Traditionally, you don a scarf and dark glasses and do it quietly in a back room across town. What's new is the idea that parting with Mom's locket or Dad's pocket watch is a rollicking good way to spend a Friday night, accompanied by spinach dip and boxed wine.

As has been reported by WalletPop previously, would-be gold brokers should proceed with caution, particularly if they are required to make an investment upfront. And there are compelling arguments for keeping the lid on your jewelry box for now.

Kyran Pittman blogs at Notes to Self.

Whimsical children's' retailer Land Of Nod is holding its Spring Cleaning Sale, with up to 80% discounts on kids' bedding, furniture, decor, toys and more.

It's a great time to stock up on seasonal items: the Ain't No Mountain High Enough toboggan is marked down to $49 from $129. It would look great under next year's Christmas tree.

Easter baskets, winter holiday crafts and Valentines are also on sale. Heads up to those who read my post on Budget Birthday Party Going for Kids: these designer duds piggy banks (phthalate-free) make a novel birthday gift or party favor for children age 3 to ten, especially accompanied by a roll of nickels, dimes or quarters for their opening day deposit!

Signs explaining how management has no choice but to pass along their increasing costs to the end consumer are becoming as familiar a point-of-sale display as an Am-ex tent card. Everything from a carton of eggs at the supermarket to the paper cup for my coffee comes with a side order of doom these days.

So it was refreshing, to say the least, to receive this in an e-letter from a Little Rock, Arkansas business yesterday:

NO HIGHER PRICES!

Boulevards answer to the unbelievably higher prices for flour, (from $10 a bag to $29 a bag), butter, eggs, and all other commodities is to be more efficient, waste less, to work harder, and to build volume through great service and exceptional quality products, (we are working tirelessly to improve service daily)!

You will NOT see a price increase for the foreseeable future! Please continue to support us, every customer is SO appreciated and loved!!!

-Scott McGehee, Boulevard Bread Co.

I called up Scott, who owns and operates the coffee/gourmet food shop, beloved by local hoity-toities and hipsters alike, to ask him about this radical departure from the herd. He told me that he is determined to find reasonable alternatives to making his customers carry the burden of his increased costs. How novel. Most other businesses seem to turn to the consumer's wallet as a line of first defense, not the last resort.

Last week, Walletpopper Zac Bissonette wrote about the dividends of honest customer service. Is goodwill toward an establishment money in the bank? If so, strategies like Boulevard's might yield better returns in the long run than the usual "we're suffering, so should you" line.

Have you heard of any businesses in your community taking a similar approach?

Kyran Pittman blogs about life at Notes to Self. Her essays have been featured three times in Good Housekeeping magazine's "Good Reads" section.

E-tickets, e-cards, e-gift certificates, and plastic currency. We're used to spending paperless; now how about paperless savings?

Last month I wrote about the Grocery Game, an online subscription service that can enhance coupon savings by matching grocery store specials with coupons. Grocery Game, and a similar (free) coupon tracker, Coupon Mom, both feature printable coupons on their sites. But our own AOL takes couponing to the next stage of digital evolution with Shortcuts, paperless coupons that you store to your grocery store membership/discount card.

Now we're talking.

Just the other day, I came home from a grocery run (where I realized nearly 50% savings, thanks to coupon/sales matching), and realized I'd left about $5 worth of additional savings on the table. Literally. My kitchen table. Grocery Game or not, it's hard to keep track of all those flimsy bits of paper, let alone clipping and sorting them. I love the idea of having them stored on my Kroger card. No coupon left behind!

Unfortunately, the Shortcuts selection at this time is woefully limited. A measly eight coupons. And while my regional chain, Kroger, is a partner store, the full list is quite limited. But I have high hopes that my cutting and sorting days will soon go the way of the 8-track, so I'll be checking back.

Shortcuts is free to anyone with an AOL or AIM account.

Kyran Pittman blogs about life at Notes To Self, where her musings on culture, soul and laundry have been picked up and published three times by Good Housekeeping magazine.

Daily Deal for Tuesday, April 1: Before there was The Office, there was Despair Inc.. Since discovering the website several years ago, I can never look at motivational "art" quite the same way. The company parodies the genre with a full range of products, from t-shirts to posters, with stirring captions such as:

Despair: It's always darkest just before it goes pitch black.

And:

Failure: When your best just isn't good enough.

The designs so closely mimic the irony-free version (such as those offered by the likes of Successories--seriously--not a parody), it could take weeks before the boss notices that the caption beneath the pretentiously typeset word, "TRADITION" reads, "Just because you've always done it that way doesn't mean it's not incredibly stupid."

There's never been a better time to find out: Despair Inc. is having an April Fool's special, today only, with site-wide markdowns, and bonus gifts with purchases of $35 and more. To access Despair.com today, enter the user name "april" with the password "fools." All orders placed today will not ship until April 11.

This post is part of our series on people, places and things finding new life in 2008.

Uno the Beagle made history last month when he took Best of Show in the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, becoming the first of his breed to ever do so. Did the winner's triumphant barking herald a comeback of this decidedly un-exotic breed, the Wonder-Bread of canines? Well, not exactly.

The American Kennel Club, which has kept registration statistics of AKC-recognized breeds for nearly a century, reports that the humble Beagle, while perhaps not the most fashionable of its species, has never really gone out of style. Although the Beagle's popularity peaked during the fifties (think Snoopy), when it ranked most popular from 1954 to 1959, it is the only breed that has consistently remained in the top ten most popular since 1915. Not exactly a B-list-er.

Nonetheless, the Westminster victory means the hound can proudly hold his tail upright among any of the other breeds we have come to think of as more fashionable.

Some other classic breeds that may be ripe for renewed appreciation include the poodle, which ranked most popular through the sixties and seventies, and the cocker spaniel, which was overtaken by the Beagle as most popular, after ranking number one from 1936-1953, and made a comeback in the eighties.

This post is part of our series on people, places and things finding new life in 2008.

Call it "green" or think of it as post-modern, but Hollywood seems to be deeply committed to recycling.

Indiana Jones, X-Files, Batman, the Hulk, Harry Potter, and the Mummy will all soon be returning to the big screen. Even Star Trek will boldly go where it has gone, uh, ten times before.

I admit, I am a-tingle about the return of Indy and (hopefully) his bullwhip. I was a teenage girl during the original trilogy run, and Harrison Ford's performance imprinted on me as the very definition of masculine sexy. Me and Dr. Jones, we had a thing going on. And although Batman has never moved me in that way, I will probably go see Dark Knight out of respect for the late, great Heath Ledger's swan song as the Joker.

But some of these comebacks, like X-Files, make me feel the way I do when I happen to be listening to an "oldies" station and hear the Barenaked Ladies. Or when VH1 rolled out I Love the 90s. Dude. It's too soon.

Nostalgia can't be rushed to the table. Pop culture, the good stuff, needs to be left alone in the dark and forgotten about, before you can uncork it as vintage. The bad kind never does get any better.

I have an on-again/off-again relationship with couponing. I save the coupon inserts that come in my Sunday paper, but clipping and sorting them is a chore that keeps getting bumped to the bottom of my to-do list. Expiry dates come and go, and I wind up paying full price for items I had coupons for.

From time to time, I've been inspired by someone's testimony to step it up a notch. By strategically matching promotional sales with manufacturer and store coupons, many savvy shoppers say they save hugely. I don't dispute it, but whenever I've attempted to do the same, it took me so much time to get all my couponing ducks in a row, the hourly rate was hardly worth it.

Enter the Grocery Game, an online subscription service that is supposed to do all the thinking for you. For $4.95, I signed up for a four-week trial subscription, which gives me access to a weekly couponing plan of attack. The service matches local sales to locally circulated coupons. Lists vary from state to state. As an Arkansas subscriber, I can choose from one or both of the major supermarket and drugstore chains. I chose both.

It can't predict what you'll be when you finally grow up, or whether that tall dark handsome someone is on your horizon, or whether the baby you're expecting will be a boy or a girl, but Voyant claims it can help forecast the financial impact of going back to school, getting married or having a baby.

The new Java application, available for free download and use, is designed to evaluate personal finance in the context of "life stages," like child-rearing, retirement and marriage. Wizards help users set up timelines that can can be revised to reflect the vagaries of fate and desire.

Consider my husband's 40th birthday, when we learned I was unexpectedly pregnant with our third child. Voyant could have quickly run the new scenario against our pre-existing financial data and thrown up a visual snapshot of the feasibility of him retiring before 65. If the application's claim of "game-like usability" extended to animated graphics, it might show snowballs, melting quickly in hell.

Perhaps some knowledge is best left to sink in slowly.

But for those who can handle a glimpse of the future, Voyant promises to make the implications of key life decisions more concrete.

The application also marries social-networking with number crunching, permitting users to engage with others over the platform. Other features include individualized recommendations and referrals to financial planners in specific areas. Voyant supports both Windows and Mac OS.

With two kids in grade school and a third in part-time preschool, the number of birthday party invitations we receive is staggering. Over the next 72 hours, I will make two trips to Chuck E. Cheese. Which twice exceeds the quota established by the Council for Not Losing Your Freaking Mind.

The mileage alone is exorbitant. The home birthday party seems to be extinct in my children's' social circle, with celebrations held at whatever newest inflatables / bowling / gymnastics facility has opened, usually in an industrial park on the outskirts of town. I am sure if I added up the fuel cost times three kids at 14 years each, I would do just as well to buy a trailer and make our weekend home the parking lot of whatever party spot is this season's must-rent.

On top of the time and gas money spent, one is not expected to show up empty-handed to these soirees. I have a strict limit of ten dollars per gift, which is on the cheap thrifty side, relative to the other offerings on the gift table. Let's do the math again: three children X 15-20 classmates each X $10.00=a nice annual deposit on an Education IRA.

Birthday parties and presents are part of childhood, however, and my boys love them. With a little advance planning, they don't have to break the bank, and can even (if a monetary value can be placed on good times) be a bargain, considering that entertainment, a snack or meal, and party favors are provided.

Survey results released last month at the North American Veterinary Conference showed that pet owners are more likely to cut back on other monthly expenses before skimping on care or supplies for their pets.

The online survey of 665 pet owners (including 602 who have a dog or cat) was conducted in late December by Fleishman-Hillard International Communications, "to help give our animal care clients better insight into how changes in the economy might affect their plans for 2008," said Brian Cox, Fleishman-Hillard senior vice president, quoted in a Reuters article about the survey.