WalletPop

Did you receive your economic stimulus check yet? These companies are offering you something extra if you will spend those bonuses with them.

SUPERVALU, nationwide chain of 2,500 grocery stores.
The deal: For every $300 gift card purchase purchased with a stimulus check, Supervalu will add an additional $30.
The catch: Good 5/2/08 thorugh 7/31/08

Staples, nationwide office supply chain.
The deal: $150 off $1,000 of furniture: $40 off purchase of $300 or more (except computers).
The catch: Expires 5/18/08

Sears, KMart and Land's End, retailers of fashion and home goods.
The deal: Convert your check to a Sears, K-Mart, or Land's End gift card and they'll give you another gift card worth 10% of that value. For those receiving a full $600, that's a free $60.
The catch: The offer begins May 14th and expires 7/18/08, and is only good for in-store purchases.

Home Depot, retailer of construction and home supplies.
The deal: discounts on environmentally-friendly items.
The catch: None noted.

Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer of home, fashion and food products.
The deal: Will cash checks free, no purchase required.
The catch: None noted.

Sam's Club, Wal-Mart's bulk sales membership-required retailer.
The deal: Free membership for non-members or a $40 gift card for existing members with purchase of selected items. Free cashing of the stimulus check.
The catch: May 18-31.

Lowe's, retailer of construction and home supplies.
The deal: Will cash checks for free, no purchase required.
The catch: None noted.

Meijer, retailer of home goods, clothes, and groceries.
The deal: $30 gift coupon for every $300 Meijer gift card purchased with rebate
The catch: Valid 5/2/08 to 5/31/08

RadioShack, nationwide vendor of electronics.
The deal: 10% off purchases over $50, with the balance of the check put on a Mastercard gift card.
The catch: Valid May 4- July 12, 2008.

Kroger, national grocery chain.
The deal: $30 bonus on every $300 purchase of store gift cards.
The catch: May 2 through July 31, 2008.

Shop 'N Save, Cub Foods, Albertsons, Acme, Farm Fresh, Jewel-Osco, groceries owned by SuperValu Co., grocers.
The deal: $30 bonus on every $300 purchase of store gift cards.
The catch: May 2 through July 31, 2008.

CVS/pharmacy, pharmacies.
The deal: For loyalty club members, $5 off a $30 purchase.
The catch: None noted.

Food Lion grocers.
The deal: $30 bonus on every $300 purchase of store gift cards.
The catch: None noted

Safeway grocers.
The deal: shoppers that cash their check at Safeway will receive a coupon good for 10% off groceries purchased within two days.
The catch: Good May 14- July 19th.

Menards, construction and home supplies, in the Midwest.
The deal: 5% bonus tacked onto store credit when you cash your check at Menards.
The catch: None noted.

Here we go again. Congress is investigating the possibility of returning to the steel pennies last seen during WWII as a way of ending the most foolish of circumstances, i.e.; it costs more than a penny to make a penny. 1.26 cents, to be exact.

That's not the end of the idiocy; a nickel costs 7.7 cents to make, according to an AP report. Dimes can be made for 4 cents, a quarter for 10 cents. The millions of oh-so-useful dollar coins (useful as ballast, that is,) cost us 16 cents.

Here's a very cheap solution, Congress; ditch the penny. It's just an annoyance. The reason we need to stamp out so many? People don't want to carry them, since they are so useless. Ditching them would open up a slot in the cash drawer for the $1 coin.

And If you want $1 coins to gain acceptance, quit printing paper ones, and make them easily distinguishable. Some countries have coins with holes in them, others have two-part coins (the English pound, for example), of two different metals. Give that consideration.

If you don't like those ideas, how about this- one day a year, offer to buy back pennies for 1.2 cents apiece. I guarantee you'll be flooded with enough pennies that you can shut down production, and save money.

Mexicans working in the U.S. no longer have to wait in boredom while their phone calls home from New York connect. Companies like VoodooDox (owned by Disney and others) are selling advertising to fill those idle seconds.

Unfortunately, the marketing seems to work. According to Advertising Age, 12% or more of the time callers respond to the whispered pitches for products such as money wiring (callers are prompted to press "1" if they want more info on the product advertised). Among the clients that use the service are radio stations, to torment callers waiting on the line to win free tickets to a concert.

I lump this together with spam, telemarketing and door-to-door solicting as types of marketing for which we can only blame ourselves. These would disappear overnight if we simply didn't respond. If we do respond to this new ad type, guess what? On-hold times will just increase, more time to wring a buck from our wallets.

So, if you find yourself being pitched in this way while on hold, do us all a favor and stick your hand in your pocket.

For under $2,000, you can buy a brand-new vehicle that will get 100 mpg, and can be parked almost anywhere. With gas at $4 and heading up, perhaps it's time we took another look at the world's answer to cheap transportation, the scooter.

I'm not suggesting the old-style two-stroke, high polluting pieces of crap, but modern, high-quality machines from manufacturers such as Honda.

For example, check out the--

Honda Metropolitan, $1,899. Honda matches classic scooter styling with a 49 cc. four stroke liquid-cooled engine for a ride capable of carrying you 100 miles or so on a gallon of petrol. Talk about cutting down the cost of transportation.

Yamaha Vino, $1,949. This scoot features a comparable engine to the Honda, and gets around 110 mpg. It too has classic European styling and Yamaha quality.

Vespa still has plenty of dogs in this hunt, including the Piaggio Fly50, a 50 cc. four-stroke selling for $1,849. It also captures the scooter cache with handsome styling.

Of course, scooters have limitations, primarily weather. Riding them in traffic takes some practice and skill, and taking a motorcycle training course from the Motorcycle Safety Institute would greatly improve your skills. But with gas going nowhere but up, a little two-wheeled fun might help keep your budget from running out of gas.

Fast food has been blamed for the plague of Dunlop disease in the U.S. ("My belly dunlop over my belt.") Certainly, a typical meal at McDonald's takes a lot of work to burn off. A Quarter-pounder with Cheese (in Europe, a Royal with Cheese), fries and a medium Coke contains 1,100 calories. The average person needs 1,800- 2,500 calories for an entire day to maintain consistent weight.

However, most chains now offer waistline-friendly selections. For example, McDonald's has compiled suggested menus that don't require you to eat leaves and twigs. These include-

Breakfast:
Sausage Burrito
12 oz. orange juice
440 calories
(For comparison, two glazed Krispy Kreme doughnuts have 400 calories)

Lunch:
4 pc. Chicken McNuggets w/ honey dipping sauce
Side salad with a half pack of Newman's Caesar dressing
Small Sprite
470 calories

Supper:
Cheeseburger
Apple dippers with low-fat caramel sauce
Small Diet Coke
400 calories

Certainly these menu selections aren't perfect; they are high in fat, sodium and cholesterol. However, for sedentary workers they make a lot more sense.

Are you penny-wise? If so, this is a perfect time to save some Lincolns. On May 12th, the US Post Office is raising the price of the first-class stamp by one cent, from $0.41 to $0.42. I can only conclude they make a killing on one-cent stamps.

Luckily, I've been buying Forever Stamps, which sell for the same price as the current first-class stamps, but remain valid for first-class postage no matter how much it increases. Given the stock market results over the last few quarters, my stamps have out-yielded my index stocks by a considerable margin.

I'm mystified by people that still buy priced stamps. The post office apparently sells a lot of $0.41 stamps, though, and will probably sell as many $0.42 ones to those who value the appearance of the stamp enough to offset the annoyance of keeping a stock of one-centers. Me, I'm buying Forever Stamps, and doing it before May 12th.

I'm not one to follow the travails of America's debutantes and their persecution by paparazzi. However, I have been puzzled by the brouhaha this week that has broken out over Hannah Montana's photos in Vanity Fair. The pics show Mily Cyrus, the actress/singer who portrays the television character, wrapped in a sheet, revealing considerably less skin than would be on display in a bikini.

What no-one seems to be discussing is that the photos were taken by photographer Anne Liebowitz, certainly the most renown and one of the most artistic of current-day photographers. She's not a sleaze-monger, and her photos of celebrities, many gracing the cover of Rolling Stone, are among the most praised of this art form.

I'm guessing this is another instance of the morality police, who wouldn't know art if you wrapped it around a brick and hit them between the eyes with it, dragging Joe Average into their sex-obsessed version of reality. The same people fantasize about taking a hammer to the package of Michelangelo's David.

Sometimes the sound of one's voice is inadequate to express all the emotions humans experience. Luckily, a new invention patented by a German firm will enhance your cell phone presence with scent.

The scent chip, developed by ConVisual (they may need a name update, huh?), reproduces around 100 different smells. Of course, those on the receiving end of the call will also need the chip, to decode the eau d' squawk and create its facsimile. The tech could be available as soon as 2010.

100 different smells may seem a small selection, but this is, in fact, 25% of the 400 different odor molecules the nose is capable of detecting. The brain is able to define millions of different scents within varying combinations and quantities of these 400 molecules. If the phone can reproduce even a small fraction of these combinations, how long before our callers each have their own assigned scent tones?

This smells like trouble to me.

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

Tobias Buckell tells me that the dojo in his hometown has added a new side business to its martial arts; balloons. This is one example of a growing movement of small businesses compensating for falling sales by adding new business products, sometimes with comedic results.

In my neighborhood, the local model train shop is now also making banners. Signs announcing the lure of 'free internet inside' are on every business door except the portable toilets.

I see the potential for ancillary businesses as a great way to weather the recession. For example-

• A combination funeral parlor and Ebay shop (sell off the estate)
• Why not cross Terrier breeding with ditch digging?
• A diaper service / defumigating service would be a natural.
• Tobacconists could make a mint selling bottled oxygen.
• Why don't laundromats sell deodorant?
• How about a combination pizza parlor & Weight Watcher's center?
• An optometrist that runs a car body shop on the side.
• And pick your politician – shouldn't they be selling bottled gas?

What is the funniest or oddest business combination you've seen?

Daily Deal for Thursday, May 1, 2008: Save thousands of dollars on melanoma treatments by using inexpensive sunscreen liberally. No-Ad Maximum Sun Block Lotion SPF-45, 16 oz., $8.95 plus shipping, drugsdepot.com.

The American Cancer Society has some sensible precautions you can adopt to reduce the chance of developing skin cancer: avoid exposure during the sunniest part of the day, wear a hat and sleeves, and, of course, use sunscreen. Unfortunately, many of the brand-name sunscreen products are very pricey.

But not all. Consumer Reports recently named No-Ad Maximum Sun Block Lotion SPF-45 as a best buy, as it stands up to comparison with the top brands in performance yet sells at a price that won't tempt you to skimp on its use. The 16 oz. bottle is a good value, although if you can find it in your local pharmacy you might do better than this mail-order price, since shipping will eat up much of the savings. If you can bundle this purchase as part of a $100 order from drugdepot.com, however, shipping is free.

Don't be penny wise and pound foolish with your sunscreen, unless you like the notion of having a big ugly cancer on the tip of your nose. That's not a good look.

Tracy's blog entry yesterday about the cost of dining out caused me to reflect on the costs of entertainment, because that's what dining out is for me; a social occasion. As such, how does it stack up with other forms of amusement, on a fun/hour basis?

My entertainments roll like this:

Dining out: The carte for my wife and I usually hovers around $25-28 when we meet friends at a restaurant. Add 10 miles of driving cost to reach $30. We might be there as long as an hour and a half, if the waiter is patient and the place uncrowded, so our fun per hour is $30(.5)/1.5, or $10.00 per hour.

Reading. I recently finished The Assassin's Wife by Margaret Atwood (great book), which I bought at Half-price Books for $4.98-- plus tax, $5.35. Add a buck for the trip to the store, $6.35. It took me around 15 hours to read, so my f/h = $0.42 per hour. I could have shaved this to almost nothing via the library, but they don't like it when I write in the margins.

We watch a lot of TV, perhaps 90 hours a month (mostly baseball for me) and have about a billion channels on our cable package. Our monthly bill is around $90. The big-ass televsion set us back around $600, and should last four years, I hope, or $10.50. This puts our television f/h at $1.14 per hour.

We do go to the movies occasionally, a 10 mile round trip ($5 for each of us). Add an $8 ticket for a two hour flick, and our movie excursions f/h is $6.50 per hour.

Are you one of those rare individuals who takes travel video that is interesting, well composed, and coherant? If you, you may be able to offset part of your vacation costs by selling your video to LonelyPlanet.tv. The internet travel video site pays $500 for those inspiring, unusual or transcendent video experiences.

Samples of previously purchased videos are available on its web site. You'll note the common attributes; excellent narrator, arresting pictures, personality and out-of-the-mainstream subjects. Niagara Falls probably won't suit the bill, unless you happen to fall in and keep the camera rolling on your way down.

Thanks Gadling

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

My idea of a perfect coffee house is one that offers great java, free WiFi, comfortable chairs, electrical outlets, and not too many customers. I like a place that has enough traffic to stay in business, but not so much that it is crowded during the morning.

My current fave, where I set up shop to blog each morning, has undergone a change for the worse in the past few months. More and more frequently, formerly vacant tables are occupied by middle-aged executive types with their brand-new laptops, cell phones and lattes poised for action that never comes. I know one of these fellows, and suspect the rest are in the same boat he is, recently cut free as part of a recession-driven downsizing.

One day last week every single table and chair was occupied, forcing me to take my coffee home to sulk. When will the madness end? I'm talking to you, Mr. Bernanke- get these people back to work! And out of my chair.

I've written before about the hidden costs of driving; maintenance, depreciation and insurance. The IRS allowable deduction is a good catch-all number for estimating the cost of travel. It currently stands at $.505 per mile.

This makes it easy to estimate the cost of a round trip; the number of miles one way is about the number of dollars it will cost you. I found this very sobering when I began to consider the places I normally travel.

Each week, I meet with a writing group in a local library. The library is 4.54 miles away, so each meeting costs me $4.59, or around $250 per year. I hope that my writing improves each year by at least this much!

My good friends Brian and Carolyn live on the other side of Columbus, 21.42 miles away. Our Friday night get-togethers costs whichever drives to the other's house $21.63, before we even depart for a restaurant.

My in-laws live in Dayton, 74.68 miles away. A quick trip back and forth costs my wife and I $75.

You've probably heard the term nanotechnology, and perhaps seen products that boast of nanotech. If not, you will soon; according to The Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, there are hundreds of products already on the market that use this tech, including toothpastes, wound dressings, food storage containers, pencils, sun screens, ice axes and face cream.

So just what is nanotech? While the term has been co-opted by the sci-fi entertainment industry as an precursor to the nouveau boogey-man (thanks for nothing, StarGate!), the reality is nothing of the sort. Simply put, nanotech takes ordinary compounds and elements and creates very, very, very tiny particles of them, in structures they don't normally occur. Think of rolling out dough, then rolling it into balls for biscuits.

The classic example is the carbon nanotube. To understand the value of the nanotube, first imagine a flat sheet of clay drain tile material. Sit down on it, without any support beneath, and you'd probably end up on the ground with broken tile underneath. Shape that same sheet into a tube, such as a drain pipe, and it will support your weight just fine.

Another reason that nanotech is so valuable is that some materials have different properties at that scale. Silver, for example, becomes an anti-bacterial, the idea behind the Nano Silver Baby Mug Cup. The nano-sized chunks of titanium oxide in a sunscreen allow you to avoid that slathered-in-mayonnaise look at the beach that comes from older sunscreens containing much larger chunks of the oxide.

So nanotech is not something to be feared. I think of it as a modern-day equivalent of the invention of the arch, without which we wouldn't have had the aqueducts, Notre Dame or the Gateway to the West.