21 November—Congratulations are in order:

To Joe Biden for making it to 79 yesterday. So maybe there’s hope for Bob Tucker and me.

And to Litchfield.bz for garnering 500 paid subscriptions after only six months. If LitchfieldMonitor.com went the paid-subscription route, I’d also lose readers. Nah . . . don’t worry, I’m too lazy to do bookkeeping. It’s easier—if considerably less lucrative—to be an impoverished scribbler and hurl my invective for free.

Harking back to Consumer Reports, then, I neglected to mention that the three times I paid for their car-pricing service, in 1991, 2005, and 2010, as I recall—twice for friends, once for myself—the first prices the dealers offered were actually lower than the lowest prices Consumer Reports had suggested for the identically equipped cars. All three times. With no negotiating—which I did anyway, of course.

While on passionate consuming, can you believe that Stop & Shop is selling teensy weensy packs of foot-long fire logs for $6.99? And that people are actually buying them? At that price, a one-foot-deep face cord would cost about $250 and a full four-foot-deep cord would cost $1,000! And I give away cordwood.

Four things irk me about Aldi’s in Torrington: First, it’s not in Litchfield. (Same goes for PriceRite.) Second, many shelf cards post high alleged pre-markdown prices that were never charged. Third, it tests price points by fiddling around with prices far too often. Fourth, like PriceRite, among others, Aldi doesn’t offer rain checks, in contravention of Connecticut law; local management has always been cooperative when approached, but corporate suits don’t give a damn. One of these days I’ll have to take it up with the Department of Consumer Protection, if only to see what happens.

Lately, I’ve been seeing on websites “too low to show” instead of prices actually being shown in the bodies of ads. Prices aren’t shown until you go to checkout pages. And—wouldn’t you know?—prices aren’t low at all, let alone too low. So you don’t buy. Right? Do the marketing experts really think consumers are that stupid?

And Amazon.com, which doesn’t offer price matching, is being undercut more and more these days. I wonder how many people realize that and shop around online . . .