I first wrote about Costco way back in August 2009, but I wasn’t brave enough to be part of the first rush of people to visit. But after the crush of early crowds died down, I finally got around to seeing first hand whether the fuss is justified. It’s not as if I haven’t been to one of these before; on a trip to Canada many years ago I visited a similar monstrosity, and brought back a box of Hershey’s Cookies and Cream chocolate bars that I doled out to my friends. It might be a revelation for Australia, but it’s nothing on what they’ve got over across the Pacific.

The selection was underwhelming, although it would be unfair to compare it to the American versions – their plethora of choice and hyperconsumption is not an ideal we should be aspiring to. Things that I found cheap:

• Junk food. Oh my lord, you can buy this stuff for mere cents per kilo. I walked away with no less than a 1.8Kg tub of Jelly Belly jellybeans, a kilo bag of Bhuja Mix, enough breath mints to undo the effects of eating out at Korean restaurant for a year, and 2 massive bags of Rice Crackers.
• Frozen goods. Bacon shortcuts that cost about $15+ a kilo at the supermarkets went for about $10 a kilo, and likewise cheese, dim sims, chips, ice cream, etc.

Things that are about the same as, or worse than, supermarkets:

• Fresh food. Loaves of Helgas bread worked out to be $3.50 per loaf, which is more expensive that at the supermarkets, which normally sell them for $6.50 for 2 (and often less, at $5 or $6) every other week. Meat is cheaper at the butchers in a busy area, say, the Chinese side in Eastwood and fruit and veg were pretty ordinary as well.
• Gadgets. The selection of electronics and their prices were underwhelming.

On that pet topic of mine: their kitchen paper towels are pretty excellent – good, tough sheets that are absorbent and can even withstand having the water wrung out of them. Their bathroom tissue, on the other hand, is atrocious. The Kirkland 2-ply tissues are thin and tear easily.

In saying I couldn’t find much to buy, I still managed to drop over $200 there, so they must be doing something right. It’s not a place I’d go to do my shopping regularly though – if only for the sake of my waistline. Maybe once or twice a year or on special occasions.

Jenny and I have both been suffering from a number of muscular and back pain problems lately. We initially put it down to our lack of exercise and generally unhealthy lifestyle, and while that’s all too true, we eventually discovered that the mattress was the main culprit.

The one that we have was the one we bought when we first got married, so we didn’t skimp, and got a fairly expensive model with a pillow top. This seemed like a good idea at first: it was comfortable, had good support, etc.

Fast forward a few years and the pillow top was showing distinct signs of the many hours we’ve spent asleep. There were two body-shaped cavities caused by the sagging foam; these shapes were not “contoured to the shape of our bodies to maximise support, blah blah blah” but horribly uncomfortable averages of all of our sleeping positions over the years. We found that we’d be constantly be sleeping slanted no matter how we positioned ourselves on the thing, not to mention the hill in the middle. 10 year warranty? Bleh. Not covered.

As a bargain hunter, my natural instinct was to go shopping for a new mattress. It’s then that I discovered the sad truth that almost all mattresses come with pillow-tops now – the manufacturers have got this scam down to a fine art (several sales people admitted as much to me).

We went to several places and tried many mattresses, but after several such failed expeditions I decided to take matters into my own hands. Going from advice that I found through Google, I decided to remove the pillow-top foam layer. Here’s a brief description of the process:

1. Unstitch the edge – relatively straightforward because it’s easy to see where the layers are, since the thing is literally just an extra layer sewn on top of the mattress. We tried to unstitch as little as possible but still ended up doing 2 adjacent sides.
2. Detach the foam layer – our model used long thin plastic thingies to keep the layers in place. Y’know, like those things that hold tags onto clothes in the shops with a wide bit at either end and a stringy part in the middle. Yeah, that. I just used a hobby knife to cut them all.
3. Remove the foam layer – this is a lot harder than it sounds. The friction between the layers meant that it wasn’t simply a matter of yanking it out. That’s why we had to unstitch half the top, so that we could separate the layers as much as possible so it would be easier to pull.
4. Sew the top back on – in theory you could just toss the whole thing and just buy a new mattress topper, pad or overlay to replace it, but on ours, the top layer had some foam cells and a thinner foam layer glued directly underneath. These probably wouldn’t have contributed much (if anything) to the sag, so we decided to keep it.

End result: an almost good-as-new (firm) mattress, and anywere between $700 – $1500+ saved. Let’s be realistic about the results though. It’s not as if the springs themselves hadn’t sagged in 5 years – the middle still has some height to it, but it’s nowhere near as bad as it was with the foam.

Some things in life simply don’t make sense – for example I recently read that it’s possible to sail faster than the wind. Think about it: how can you go faster than the thing that’s pushing you without introducing an external force? Yes, it’s possible. Another counterintuition I’ve discovered, this time relevant to everyday life, is that money can buy time.

I was brought up with Asian values, which is to say practicality trumps everything when it comes to finances. A perfect illustration of this is if one of your grandparents overseas died, and you don’t attend the funeral because you can’t get a cheap (discounted) airfare. It’s taken a long time to free myself from that mindset, and longer still to push through to the other side, where spending is considered a pragmatic solution to a problem.

The trick I used is to consider time and effort as “billable work” – this is the same thinking that led to the conclusion in my previous post about how spending less time getting to and from work is equivalent to a pay rise.

Work out what YOU’RE worth
Firstly, what’s your hourly rate? What is your time worth? If you don’t know where to start, then work it out in terms of your current job. What are you worth to them? Then, factor in how much you value your personal time – do you have a hobby or business that you’d rather be doing than work, chores or other distractions? If so try and put a figure against that – how much would somebody need to pay you to pull you away from that activity?

Work out what IT’S worth
Now that you know what you’re worth, you can work out whether it would cost less to get somebody to do something for you than to do it yourself. For example it might make sense for you to get your meals catered instead of cooking it yourself, when you consider the time saved from not having to shop and cook, on top of the money you’re already spending on groceries. Therefore although at face value it might seem like an additional expense, the true benefit lies in how much more free time it gives you to do other productive or enjoyable things.

What are some of the things in your life that would be worth paying for, in order to spend more time on the things you love?

Not very long ago I worked in a job where it only took 15 minutes by car each way to and from work, door to door (and not just on a good day – I go against the traffic). Recently, I’ve been working in the city, and the commute is 45 minutes each way, door to door (and that’s if there isn’t some delay with the trains).

In essence I’ve lost about an hour each day, an hour where I would previously have done my gardening or made dinner. That one extra hour per day, considering your average 8 hour work day, works out to be 12.5% more time that you’re spend as you “go about your business” so to speak, even if it’s unproductive (reading or playing games while on public transport notwithstanding).

Think about that if you’re looking for work, and consider whether it might be worthwhile finding a job closer to home, even if it pays 12.5% less. You might find that the personal dividends well worth the sacrifice in monetary terms.

One thing that irked me when I was single, and is only marginally improved now as part of a married couple, was the amount of food I threw away because the portions sold in shops is more than what I need. Herbs in particular – a recipe calls for a few leaves of basil, but they’re only sold in bunches. Sure, there are plenty of things I can do – freeze them, dry them, or even feed them to my worms – but you can’t argue with fresh ingredients.

I decided to combat this problem, and chalk up another notch in my quest to live a greener lifestyle, by growing my own. To my great surprise, it turned out to be stupendously easy. Serendipitously, a nearby neighbour put out a bunch of plastic pots for hard trash collection, and I added to that a bag of potting mix and a few seeds, and the next thing you know, I now have a garden!

Basil growing in a fancy “self-watering” pot. I’d originally envisaged having several kinds of herbs in that pot, hence the shallots on the left, but the basil grew like crazy and took over. I’ve since moved the shallots elsewhere and hope to get some mint in there.

And here are the shallots. Or spring onions. Or green onions. I seriously have no idea. The long green things. I don’t think that they’re ever going to grow to the size of the ones that you seen in the shops (the pot isn’t big enough) but they taste the same. It just means they look more like chives than shallots when you add them to dishes.

Rocket. This stuff’s great! They grow super quickly and they taste great. This too, was originally growing in the basil pot but got relocated to their own (bigger) pot after I realised their prolific potential.

Curled-leaf parsley, looking somewhat unpleasant here ‘coz I’ve let it grow a bit too old. You’re supposed to be able to let parsley go to seed, so that you pretty much have a endless supply. Then again, a new packet of seeds costs like $2.50 from Bunnings…

My pride and joy… chillis! Look how many of them there are! They’re not ripe yet, hence why they’re green, but Jenny cut one up to try (you can eat them whenever) and they’re pretty darned hot!

Roma tomatoes. There’s only 4 of them – would’ve been 5 if I didn’t actually knock one off while trying to fix the stake that they’re attached to. These buggers grow tall! I bought this one as a kit from Bunnings for about $30, which includes the pot, potting mix and both Roma and Cherry variety of tomatoes which you alternate planting one season after the other.

Lastly, the budding start to what I hope will eventually be carrots. Probably a bit too ambitious here trying to grow carrots in pots, but I had a big pot and a lot of potting mix left over.

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That’s my herb collection. The garden didn’t stop there – we also have several indoor plants, some flowers which aren’t flowering at the moment so they’re pretty boring to look at, and also these succulents, which are slightly more interesting:

Yay gardening! Have you ever tried growing anything (either successfully or unsuccessfully)?