Category: Products & Services (Page 17 of 24)

A couple of months ago, Grocery Outlet opened a branch in San Leandro, just across the street from me. I’ve blogged about it before, in my food blog, but I’m writing about it here because the store sells non-food products as well. As you could expect, it sells beauty products. What has surprised me is the number of brand-name products it sells. And not just your regular, supermarket brand-name products, but the more exclusive, expensive ones. And of course, they are sold at considerably lower prices than at the supermarket/drug-store. And indeed, some of this stuff you can’t even get at regular stores. I’m impressed.
For the last few days I’ve been looking for biodegradable sunscreen to use in Mexico – the regular stuff is bad for the coral reefs. I couldn’t find it at Safeway, Longs or Target – but they have it, along with other natural sunscreen and regular lotions, at Grocery Outlet. The sunscreens they have are from Alba Botanica, and they are all-natural without chemicals. Pretty cool. I forgot how much they were, but less than $3. They had a few varieties. They also have Aveeno sunscreen, for $5 for 4 oz – I think it was $9 at Target. I’m not sure that this one is biodegradable, however. I also saw some Jason Tea Tree Scalp Normalizing Shampoo, which sells at Target for about $10, for about $4. But you can’t count on them having a specific product, they often get just one shipment of a product, and when it’s gone, it’s gone. But chances are, they will replace it with yet another high-end product.
As for food, they sell Harris Ranch beef, but only Tyson chicken, which I won’t buy because of their history of torturing chickens. I haven’t seen Twinnings tea yet :-(, but they have/had Good Earth – which you can accompany with some Walkers Stem Ginger and Lemon Cookies ($1.50!).
It doesn’t pay to go to Grocery Outlet to buy a specific product, it may very well not be there, but I think it’s worth it to browse there once in a while to see if something cool has come. Just make sure to grab it immediately, as it won’t be there on your next visit.
Grocery Outlet
2179 E 14th St
San Leandro
(510) 895-3605

It has happened. Analog TV is no more – now, if you want to watch TV, you need to buy a digital TV, have cable or use a converter box with your regular TV. Being poor and cheap, the latter was really the only alternative we considered.
We got the Channel Master CM-7000 Digital to Analog TV Converter Box at Amazon.com with a government coupon. I got it because it was the best rated converter – and while we’ve had it for months, Mike only installed it Saturday, when regular TV stopped working. So far, it’s worked very well. Mike didn’t have much trouble installing it, and the reception it gets is better than what we had before with the regular antenna. The one annoying part is that you have to now use its remote to change channels (the TV has to be set at channel 4), but that remote doesn’t work with the sound, so we still have to use the regular remote for the sound. It also doesn’t use the whole surface of the TV screen to display the image – basically there is a 2″ black border around the TV program now, I don’t know if there is something that can be done about that.
But so far, I’m relatively happy. We still have another converter (which Mike bought despite the fact it got HORRIBLE reviews), that we need to install in one of the other TVs. Alas, we’re still going to end up one-TV short. It’s not a big deal, but I like having the TV on when I’m cleaning the bedroom or the kitchen.

It really couldn’t be slower.

When I have to fly somewhere, usually the first place that I check for flights is Expedia. I’m not sure why, perhaps because it was the first travel site out there. But I usually end up buying from Travelocity, but the site is more annoying to use, as it doesn’t give you full details about the flight from the beginning. Today it was particularly annoying as I found two good itineraries I was ready to buy – and both changed price (by several hundreds of dollars) while I was booking them.
So the moral of the story is that you have to check all three sites (and perhaps others?) before buying plane tickets.