I was lucky enough to take a few vacation days in Portland, Maine last week. It's a great town filled with friendly, smart people, lots of art galleries, and funs stuff to do. It lives up to its reputation as the San Francisco of the East Coast, though I still prefer the real SF.

There were a few really great places I want people to know about:

Mexicali Blues is a clothing and odds and ends store in the port area near the water. My girlfriend was in heaven visiting Mexicali as they had a ton of great clothes and accessories. She actually got 3 different random things she has been talking about wanting for a long time, a totally hip punk rock style fanny pack/ utility belt, a bunch of felt flower rings and hair clips, and a beautiful silk wraparound sari.

The Flatbread Company is a pizza place on the water with great all-organic ingredients. Really tasty, and the place has a wonderful vibe. If you go there on a Tuesday, part of the money you spend goes to benefit various charitable causes.

Treehouse Toys on Exchange Street has a ton of great toys with lots of unusual offerings like puppets, wooden toys, and educational toys for kids. Further up exchange street, there is a gallery called Edith & Edna (51 Exchange Street) that has a lot of stuffed animal artists. Wonderful stuff. They even have a variety of crafting workshops they teach there. You can reach them at 207 776 8578 to find out if there are any classes going on when you'll be in town.

One of the nice things about Portland is it's small enough to walk around the entire city in a few hours. I highly recommend walking along the water to the east side of town and hiking up the trail through the park on that side of town.

Anyway, if you've never been, consider visiting Portland for a day or so. It's really a fun town and a very relaxing place to spend a few days.

With the rise of all the new social sharing technologies like flickr, digg, and flagr, the web is getting back to its roots as a community building and content sharing medium. Yub.com brings social tech into the field of shopping, and once you've seen it, you won't be able to go back to Web 1.0 commerce again.

Yub's motto cleary maps out what you can do there, Meet.Hang.(and)Shop. Generaly when shopping for something, you usually are faced with at least 2 major problems: what version of the type of thing that you need are you going to buy (what product) and how can you get it at a good price? Yub uses collaborative techniques to solve both these issues, allowing you to network with people to get advice on products, and sharing their affiliate revenue with you if you make a purchase. There are lots of major sites they are partnered with like Target.com, Buy.com, and Dell.com, and if you buy after going through Yub, Yub gives you back anywhere from 2 to 25% of the purchase price. (The range may vary more, those are just numbers I plucked from scanning the site).

You can't argue with the value of getting a discount while shopping. It's great, and the main reason to use Yub. Hopefully at some point the knowledge sharing, networking part of the site will offer the same value. I was disappointed in the section where you could Meet People and the Raves/Fan Clubs area, both of which seemed more like place holders that vibrant communities. There is an Advice and Deals section where people post coupon codes and notices about deals that seemed a bit more useful, but the main draw is the cash back Yub gives you on the sales.

I'm not sure how long this will last. More and more merchants are skeptical of rewards sharing programs, and they could stop their association with Yub at any point. While it's functioning though, go give it a try.

I was talking to someone the other day about the plan the government was researching about 4 years ago to have the value of money expire if it wasn't used. So, you would earn a dollar, and that dollar, as it aged, would become worth less, at a rate that was accelerated beyond the rate of inflation. The idea was to try to accelerate the economy by encouraging consumer spending. Luckily, this craziness didn't go too far, so we don't have the added burden of having to think of how old every penny we earn is.

I think the flip of this idea is interesting though. What if after you've acquired a possession, you still had to do something to keep your ownership of it. So, let's say you buy an exercise bike for example, and you don't use it. Someone could come repossess the bike because by not utilizing it you aren't earning the right to keep it. Think of all the things that you own that would disappear because you are basically neglecting them. If ownership required a commitment to the object possessed, the entire relationship to consumption would be fundamentally altered. Maybe you wouldn't even have to pay for the object to begin with, just show you deserve it by showing up and using it in the store for example. The store would really be a storage place where objects that are disused would be restored to until they could be redistributed. Over time these would develop into museums of the useless, with piles of unread books, unworked tools, and unworn clothing. For me, this would be a happier world, as I am both an impulse purchaser and a total packrat. If only the repo men would come tote my garbage away!

My girlfriend is the consummate bargain shopper. She signs up to get coupons, watches out for sales, and will drive halfway across the state to save 50%. It's not really that she even loves shopping that much. She is however, addicted to bargains, to getting the really good deal. Of course, there is the issue of false economy to deal with. If you save $5 but you spend an hour doing so, unless you earn only $5 an hour, you are actually losing money in terms of the value of your leisure time. However, it's not about the economics I think, it's the joy of putting one over on the powers that be by getting something at a super low price. She's not the only one with this problem either. If you go to the day after thanksgiving sales it's pretty clear it's a social phenomenon.

Many cultures are built around the opposite urge, centered around rituals of squandering, of wasting. Check out Marcel Mauss' The Gift or Bataille's Accursed Share to read about how this waste plays a pivotal role in western as well as non-western cultures. What then is the joy of frugality about? Is it waste with guilt built in? We don't need much of the stuff we acquire on sale, so it's arguably just a safe form of waste that makes one less anxious about engaging in it. Maybe it's just a pure game, like poker, where one feels satisfied by figuring out the most profitable solution. Whatever it is, it is very real. I would say more, but there is a half-off sale at the comic store and I must be on my way . . .

I've always loved action figures, and thankfully it is now socially acceptable to collect them after the age of 10. Recently, I was given some new figures made by Strangeco, a San Francisco company, and based on the designs of Rocket World. The Figures are part of the Insurgents Wilderness Gruppo series, a series made up of armed animals that are fighting back against a human dominated world. Some portion of the proceeds goes to wildlife conservation groups, so the slogan - Save the world by Buying Dolls - can now be uttered with complete sincerity.

The backstory from the Strangeco website is classic:

"In the not-too-distant future, a strange cosmic retrovirus infects the Earth and spreads through the biosystem. The virus causes rapid evolutionary change and other mutations in a group of animals from around the globe. These new breeds organize an armed resistance against the plague that has been destroying their habitat for centuries - the human race! Meet the I.W.G - The I.nsurgents W.ilderness G.ruppo - and ¡viva la revolucion!"

My favorite of the group is the Rhino, Affonso, armed with an AK-47. Other classics include Desmond the Dolphin with an undersea mine and Irra the Owl with a bomb clutched between its feet.

There are certain products that get used in really annoying ways. For example, think of people that drive their cars poorly, or people that type too loudly, or people that highlight their books using actual highlighters. Of course, these uses don't annoy everyone. So, I think Product Peeves are a good way to describe the ways of product usage that you dislike as a matter of personal preference. My top product peeves have to be the following: The conspicuous use of any type of new gadget (let me needlessly type out an email at work on my smart phone just to show I have a smartphone, or let me watch a video on my ipod even though i could watch in on my laptop to show i have a video ipod). A second would be wearing more than one cell phone on your belt (come on, you aren't batman, put away the utility belt). Finally, I can't stand people that sing while wearing walkmans in public places (the loud music means you don't have to hear your awful rendition, spare us as well, please).

You have Product Peeves, I know you do. Share! Verbalizing is the first step towards a cure.

Ok, grocery shopping isn't necessarily a hip thing to do. It is however, a required part of life due to our annoying need to consume food to survive. So, if you have to do it, you might as well get the most out of it and make it as painless and as cheap as possible.

In the New Haven area, to turn shopping from an expensive boring chore to something else, you basically need to know about 2 stores, Trader Joe's and M & M Farms Produce of Milford.

Trader Joes is a national chain that seems to approach the idea of the basic grocery store in a very different way. First of all, their prices are very reasonable, much better than larger chains such as Stop & Shop or Shaw's. More interesting to me though is their great selection of organic and vegetarian food options, and their huge variety of packaged foods that you just have to heat and serve. There is a strong emphasis on non-western culinary traditions, so you can easily get things like bags of Edamame or Papadam chips. If you aren't eating organic meets and dairy, you should be, and Trader Joe's can help you get on the right path without having to spend a ton of money (you'll save money versus normal grocery stores, and end up with better food). Finally, Trader Joe's is great due to its laid back and friendly employees, all dressed in colorful Hawaian shirts. Trader Joe's is located at 560 Boston Post Road in Orange.

If you live in the New Haven area, you should never buy fruits and vegetables from anywhere other than M & M farms, located on 804 Boston Post road. They have the best produce at prices that are less than half of what you would pay at a chain grocery store. You can also get fish, baked goods, or deli meats at great low prices. Finally, they have a great asian specialty store where you can get a wide variety of south and east asian spices and foods (everything from japanese candy to indian fast food).

Go forth, eat and be merry! For less!

One of the main purposes of this site is for people to exchange ideas, and a great way to do that is through the various forums setup on the site. The major forums right now are things you can't live without - a place to share stories about those possessions that you hold most dear, things you want but can't afford - your opportunity to tell us about those treasures that are just beyond your wallet's reach, and things you should have returned - help your fellow consumites by telling us about those product decisions you regret.

I will be setting up some shopping advice forums soon, along with local shopping recommendations so you can tell people about the places to know about in your area. Better living through communication! Join in today.

I was a child of the 80's. Our generation has been called many things, but the way I like to refer to us is as The Action Figure Generation. Action figures have been around since ancient times (more on this later) in some form or other, but it didn't really explode into it's modern incarnation until the original Star Wars action figures were released. I was a toy kid, and especially loved action figures. I had all the Star Wars figures, most of the small 80's GI Joe figures, Tron figures, and figures from Battlestar Galactica, Sgt. Rock, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, and many more. Not only did I have the figures, but I had the vehicles they rode in, the playsets you could stage them in, and a variety of custom made carrying cases and the like. I moved up from large to even larger boxes to hold them all. And then college came.

If only I had taken my action figures with me to college, they'd have been fine. I assumed they were safe, stored in my parents' basement. Plus, having action figures in College makes it hard to look cool, and I shudder to think what would have happened to them had my drunken colleagues come upon them in the wrong state of mind. So in my parents' basement they stayed when I left the nest.

Last year, I went home for Christmas, and was collecting all of the things from my parent's home to take to my house. Sadly, it became obvious that while my comic collection and other treasures were safe, my entire action figure collection had been disposed of. Neither of my parents could recall what happened to them, but I think they were given away to a friend of the family with a young child.

I have looked on Ebay to potentially replace some of the items, but it's just not the same. Your toys mean more to you than just the toy itself. I remember my luke skywalker was missing an arm that was chewed off by my dog, Scruffy. I was sad at the time, but then after Empire Strikes Back, I thought my figure was really cooler than the original. You can't bring back these memories from Ebay. Not to mention the price. Given the scope of my collection, it would cost me thousands to replace it all.

My childhood friends, I shall miss you always.