Don’t forget while you’re out & about this weekend, to check the stores for Halloween clearance items. Last year I got tons of decorations, treat bags, carving kits–all for 90% off. The deals will get better as the weeks progress, but of course the selection will get worse. I packed all my stuff away when I put away my Halloween decorations last year, and it was such a pleasant surprise to find my brand new things–especially remembering that I paid so little for them.

Here is the hcw board on Halloween deals, so you can check for specific stores.

Ten Thousand Villages in Ephrata is having a bag sale on Saturday. Whatever you can fit into one of their shopping bags is 20% off. Why not do some early Christmas shopping? I really like Ten Thousand Villages. It’s a Mennonite run organization that sells crafts and other items from around the world, making sure that all of the craftspeople receive a fair wage for their items. More info can be found here. They have many stores, including a closer one in Exton, but my flyer does not mention if the sale is at all stores, or just the main one in Ephrata. Why not take a nice drive out to Lancaster county and visit? They have unusual things, nice gift items and it does your heart good to be supporting the tradespeople when so many developing countries are taken advantage of.

One of the items I like that they sell is their selection of music. There’s a selection of world music for kids call Putumayo Kids. Kevin really likes it and so do I. Let’s face it, kids’ music can be terribly annoying, but this is stuff I really like, no many how many times we hear it. So far we have Animal Playground , Dreamland, and a few others. We’re big Sesame Street fans around here, so I am getting him their newest release, the Sesame Street one for Christmas. Trust me, you’ll find yourself humming and singing along to these tunes.

I’m going to put a plug out there for my favorite couponing website, hotcouponworld. There are lots of sites out there and I’ve tried several of them. I like hcw because of the way it is arranged and everything there is legit. On some other sites, I find them to be extremely disorganized, hard to follow, and sometimes you’ll see less than honest deals posted. When couponers participate in fraudulent deals, it hurts us all. Lots and lots of cashiers and managers already dislike couponers, when less than honest activity is going on, it gives them more reason to dislike us. Any deal that isn’t on the up and up on hcw is deleted quickly.

If, for no other reason, join hcw for the coupon database. If you’re wondering if there is a coupon out there to go with a deal, this is where to find it. In many of my posts, you know I’ll say “there are coupons out there for this” and you may be wondering where they are. The database will tell you what insert they were in, and you can check your inserts for it. The dates are listed on the side in very, very, very small font.

And peruse the boards, get used to the lingo and the format and join in on some discussions. It’s really a great board.

No bargains in this post, just a vent about food prices. First, I heard on the news in recent weeks that food prices were expected to rise 5%, more than the 3-4% they rose last year. Only 5%? Puh-lease. They have gone up much more than that. A loaf of wheat bread is regulary priced at $3.50 or $3.75 now, that’s more than double what I used to pay.

And I don’t know if you saw it–but I saw it both on ABC news local and national, and it was on NPR. This idea of ‘sticky prices.’ The general gist of the news stories were that-“hey, oil prices came down and then gas prices came down. We were told that food prices were going up due to high gas costs, so why aren’t food prices coming down with gas prices?”

Apparently there’s something called sticky pricing. An event, such as high oil prices, causes prices on some items to increase. But even though there was a justifiable cause, when that problem is resolved, the prices don’t come back down. Because manufacturers and retailers know that we’re just accustomed to paying these prices, so they leave them there! This phenomenon apparently will happen with groceries and air travel prices, but we can expect clothing and other items to come back down.

How annoying is that? Here is the wiki definition of sticky economics.

Well, here’s to more couponing and hoping that the retailers get more competitive with their deals.