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So true, I remember a friend really baffled me when he brashly chastised me stating "you know there's more to life than saving money". The conversation was exactly about one of these time/effort consuming strategies.

On a similar note I remember this really poignant example came during prep for my wedding where me and the wife did all these crazy craft projects and I really stretched to buy the minimal fancy paper to get everything to work out just right. I wound up blowing the small margin budget by not taking into consideration the printing fees which was being paid per page rather than per item. When I bought all these small cardstocks the cardstock savings was exhausted because I could not maximize the items rendered per print. If I instead had paid for the full sheet I would be able to print multiple items at once later cutting them up.

A tangential experience in this space too came in owning fruit trees where anyone whose owned one knows you get this downpour of a harvest. It's hard not to waste it and avoid fallen fruit and I was struck at how "wasteful" nature can be, it just hits you with an abundance that really threw me for a loop in trying to use so much effort to eat it all. At some point I really switched teams to just enjoying what I can and not getting all worked up about the lost potential. I guess the point of it all is that harvesting of any potential is not without effort, which may not be trivial or fit into our overall effort budget.

I cannot wait for my fruit trees to rain a glut onto me. On a serious note, I planted my apple trees close together hoping to stunt their growth and create more of a hedge then an orchard.

"harvesting potential is not without effort" - I love this, it's all about balancing inputs and outputs. Once you have an established tree, it will produce apples as an output with little human input. The harvest and preservation of this output requires a lot of human input.

The thing is you can use the apples in other ways, "the problem is the solution". Instead of trying to eat an apple a day and bake pies and make cider which are all human intensive tasks, you could allow something else to work on the extra apple output. For examples, pigs and goats love apples and could make short work over excess. They in turn they produce values outputs (meat, milk, poop). Don't want to be bothered owning animals.

>Shoot me, but there's only so much of life's minor routines that can be handled "strategically" before I've got no ability to enjoy family, pick fun/gutsy new professional goals, travel with gusto, etc.

The more services you have, the more the desire to strategize. A different solution is simply not to utilize so many services in your life. Do you really need all of them? I've never had wifi on a flight, and life is not miserable. Ditto for purchases. How much have you bought in the last year that you did not properly utilize and is sitting around the house that you intend to get to one day?

When you spend less time altogether shopping, then you suddenly have more time to be strategic about the things you do buy.

I really wonder just how much this author values his or her time, if at all.

Time for me to run to target: at least 70 minutes round trip.

Times amazon has leaked my credit cards, last 5 years: 0. Times other sites have idioted their way into a giant hassle for me, last 5 years: 8. Time spent arguing with the morons at my gym because I forgot to update my stolen credit card and they wanted to fine me $30: almost 40 minutes. Amount I resent having to deal with all of the above: a lot.

Times Amazon has shipped people counterfeit eclipse glasses: more than zero is too many.

I love Amazon … but the quality issues lately have been somewhat problematic.

This is unfortunately very true and the biggest risk to them imo

Yup. amazon needs to understand that they have at least partly become a luxury/convenience brand. We're willing to pay extra (not a huge amount extra, but definitely extra) to save time and effort. If you have third parties selling me counterfit garbage, then I need to spend a lot of time defending against that... and if I have to spend a lot of time evaluating that sort of thing? I might as well move over to ebay where it's cheaper.

Why do Americans get their credit card stolen so often?

Because we allow you to use the credit card without using the chip. You buy from a compromised merchant, or a merchant that isn't properly hashing it's credit cards? bam, your card is stolen. You put your card in a compromised card reader? your card is stolen. With a chip, (a smartcard credit card, like you use in Europe) this is way harder.

Yes, yes, in America, our credit cards now have chips, too... but they also have the old magstripe, and everyone buys things from the internet anyhow, so we're giving that number out to everyone.

The other side of this is that the laws in the US are heavily in the customer's favor. It's a pain in the ass, you have to complain about the charges, but it's very rare that we are actually responsible for any of the charges. (The merchant who accepted the stolen credit card is left holding that particular bag.)

Because of this? Personally, I don't worry too much about it. I figure any one of my cards might be out of commission at any point of time, and periodically I'll just call my credit card company and tell them to give me a new credit card number, just so I have a fresh one that isn't floating around all the darknet sites. I figure a credit card being compromised every five years or so is 'normal'

But it's the same in Europe. My credit card has that magstripe too. I've never used it, but it has it. And I enter my credit card number in places online. So, I don't see how I'm more protected?

I didn't know that. I thought that chip and pin was the norm in Europe, and that getting a transaction reversed as a European customer was way harder than for American customers because of this.

But... it sounds like I'm wrong.

That's not a credit card. In Germany we call it an ec card or Girocard, it's a debit card. The amount is deducted immediately from your bank account when using it and it requires PIN and chip.

I would say the cynical answer is because our credit cards are valuable. We have the mentality that we are somehow responsible for other people's crimes/criminal negligence.

Just the other day, I read about how someone managed to pick up over a thousand dollars in overdraft fees when he was struggling to make ends meet and now he never had that problem because he has access to credit cards (that he can afford to pay off in full every month so it doesn't cost him much extra).

> I would say the cynical answer is because our credit cards are valuable

This, but not for the reasons you think. In America, it is stupidly easy to get credit in general, and credit cards have high limits. Europe is much, much more conservative in that regard.

Because we don't care.

We can get a new one for free in a few days, we have many spare lines of credit, and we will not be responsible for any fraudulent charges

No Chip and PIN mandated at most checkouts and ATMs. It's much, much easier to print a fake credit card with a magstripe than a valid chip card.

Also, Americans are richer and have bigger credit lines so the cards are worth more on the black market.

Because the penalties to business for allowing this to happen are nowhere near high enough; instead, it's largely the problem of the individuals involved.

This is... the opposite of my impression, well, sortof. There aren't penalties for the business your credit card is stolen from (and I believe your credit card is usually stolen from a business you legitimately did business with.)

However, the thief? once they get that credit card? they use it with a merchant to buy a thing.

For example, last time my card was stolen, I saw a charge for some expensive jewelry from a Florida jeweler on my account. I called my credit card company and they refunded the money to my account... so who is left holding the bag? that jewler in Florda.

When I had a merchant account (selling VPSs) I had a few customers like that; the credit card company simply takes the money back, and it's up to you, the merchant, to try to get back what you just sold to the customer... something that is usually impossible.

I meant there's very little penalty to the business that allowed the theft to occur, so I can't see what we disagree about?

Oh, nm, you meant that businesses that unknowingly accept stolen cards get screwed. They certainly do.

But imagine a business had to write a $50 check to each and every cardholder whose card they leaked. I bet there would be a miracle, and systems would become securable.

I agree that if there were more consequences for compromised businesses, there would be fewer compromises... but it would also massively raise the barrier to getting a merchant account. Essentially, you'd live in a world where everyone used paypal or something like it. (I think apple pay would be in the running, too, but I think this might end up being natural-monopoly-ish)

The best way to solve the problem, I think, is to quit using shared secrets across minimally trusted parties. Public key cryptography is... I'm not going to say unbreakable, but it's pretty good. it's fairly secure. We need to enforce that on all physical card readers, which will make 'skimming' rather a lot more difficult, and then after that we need to figure out a card reader users can use on their computers and cellphones.

The technology is mostly there; most of my cellphones support some kind of secure wireless public key stuff, and most of my phones do too. We need to make this ecosystem work well, solve the software problems, and then make it so that your credit card number is just an identifier, not an authentication token.

That sounds pretty much like apple pay, no? If visa, mastercard, and the merchant banks can't be bothered to make it, then maybe apple deserves their cut.

Yes, apple pay, I think, occupies a similar place to paypal I have run a business that recieved payments through paypal; I have not run a business that recieved payments through apple pay, but my impression is that they both do the same thing... they let a business accept payments without knowing the user's credit card number, which would be essential to businesses if there was significant liability associated with credit card breaches.

Two big things about Amazon Prime (purely from a shipping perspective) for me:

1.) With more of my movie and book buying shifting to digital, I actually don't have a lot of things sitting in my wishlist any longer waiting to be popped into my shopping cart to round up a purchase

2.) Especially, as someone who travels a lot, I really (unexpectedly) found that being able to get orders fairly deterministically in a couple of days (aka less time than I'd have probably have taken to go to the store anyway) is hugely valuable.

The main downside is that, if I'm being honest, I do make some impulse purchases I probably wouldn't have made had I left things sit for a a few weeks but that's mostly another type of mental load. The buyer's regret items are both few and fairly low value.

> being able to get orders fairly deterministically in a couple of days

Seriously, this is one of the wonders of the modern world. Going elsewhere means not only wondering when an item will arrive, it means wondering whether the item will arrive at all. A 5% difference in price just isn't worth the necessary contingency planning.

A couple of times now when shopping elsewhere I've had orders deliberately delayed so that I would call and they could attempt to upsell me because they weren't making a good enough commission on the price as advertised. Life is way too short for these sort of shenanigans.

Also, once you are used to real time "in stock/out of stock" status, shopping at a physical store is an exercise in pure frustration. There are only so many times you'll buy crappy alternatives to what you actually want so that you don't "waste the trip" before you stop making the trip.

Pro-tip: write in to United any flight you have where something goes wrong. They'll usually reply with a travel certificate. They almost always have something wrong (broken wifi, in flight entertainment, delays, missed connections, etc.). Each time, it's an opportunity to score.

I write this from the airport lounge after getting off a $260 flight, which I paid mostly with a $200 certificate with the last flight's issue, and landed to a new $175 certificate for broken wifi. I'm up to over $5000 in such compensation in the past couple years.

One thing worth being strategic about.

Wow, do you also complain about not liking your meals at restaurants to try and get free desserts?

Sure, I'll complain that way at a restaurant, if:

- The restaurant is a near-monopoly at which I have to either eat at or go hungry.

- The reason I "don't like my meal", as you say, is because it was served to me multiple days late, during which time I was unable to leave and re-enter the restaurant without having to pay again (and this restaurant charges a premium).

- When I pay for food at the restaurant, I often receive an empty plate instead. The restaurant refers to this as my "not liking my meal", and chalks it up to personal preference unless I raise a stink.

- The restaurant is somewhere I am forced to eat by my employer, and my employer will not refund me when they fail to provide food.

- The restaurant has a reputation for being mismanaged and implementing policies that torment patrons--sometimes by physically beating them.

- The restaurant has slowly but surely increased prices while visibly decreasing portion sizes.

And so on. For a lot of people "just don't fly" doesn't work (people with overseas family or travel for work). And for those same people, mega-airlines like United are often the only feasible choice or one of a very few equivalently-shitty choices.

Also, complaining by email decreases (doesn't eliminate, but decreases) the annoyance caused by antagonizing an in-person employee of the airline with your grievances. The person whose day you might ruin by interrupting them is not the problem--their employer is--but it's very hard for many people to refrain from acting as if that person is responsible when they confront someone. The person whose job it is to read the complaint emails probably isn't having a great time either, but at least they can (hopefully) take a smoke break if they need to.

I don't think that is a valid comparison.

If a flight delay causes me to miss a connection, then I paid for a service (getting me from location A to location B by a certain time) that I did not actually get. Same if the Wi-Fi is out of service.

There is no implicit promise at a restaurant that you'll like your dinner.

It's more akin to an ingredient being missing or something being burnt. It's not like OP is making complaints like "the seats were uncomfortable" -- parts of the service were objectively missing.

It's a lot easier to fire off an email complaint than it is to do it in person, where it feels a lot more awkward.

Add to that, a chef made your food in a restaurant, broken WiFi on a plane isn't exactly the same kind of hand-crafted experience.

Pretty sure there’s a flight website dedicated to doing these kinds of hacks and essentially flying for free forever (after a decent amount of up front investment) but my Google Fu is failing me right now.

Maybe I should start flying UA instead of DL/AS, I have status from them via marriott. Hrm.

For me, living without Prime requires no energy and takes the form of (1) waiting a few extra days and (2) buying less casually and frequently, resulting in spending less money on things I don't need.

I've also moved most of my shopping off Amazon altogether as well, and it was surprisingly easy. Just a few searches to see who's got the best price on [x] right now. It's surprisingly often not Amazon.

I also just recently canceled Prime, and have had the same experience. I realized that I'm paying a premium for services like Video and Music that I never use. Also, it was very rare that I had a cart that didn't qualify for free shipping with or without Prime.

On the whole, I think this will lead to a much needed sanitisation of our buying habits for the coming year. We had gotten so used to buying things basically on a whim. It's good to be more thoughtful about our consumption.

What’s odd is my experience with cancelling Prime is the same with getting rid of my Facebook. Once I got rid of it I was happy and didn’t miss it. Having no prime just means I lose out on instant gratification (well 1-2 day delay becomes a week). I also did not use prime music or video, so they didn’t have their hooks in me.

> a few searches to see who's got the best price on [x] right now. It's surprisingly often not Amazon.

That's definitely not "no energy" and is kind of exactly the OP's point. Amazon might not be the cheapest but they'll still be very close, and you save time by just defaulting to them.

There are browser extensions that make them virtually "no energy". Haven't used them in a long time so I can't speak for the current experience.

I would very much dispute the "very close" claim. I find they're very close or the cheapest for fairly pricey items. For not-so-common items, or for regular supplies, they are often not even close.

I bought a steamer rack from them for over $15. It's a very popular item, made from a well known brand and with over 1000 reviews. Just last week I was in a local grocery store and found a very similar steamer for less than $7. Looking at similar steamers in Amazon, they are all above $10 if I order Prime. I do see one which is about $8, but I have to specially select the non-default non-Prime option for that listing. On a search result, it shows up as $11, not $8. Note that I am not a Prime member, yet those are the prices I see when I search.

If you do a lot of "regular" shopping, those deltas really add up.

One thing GP mentioned is family.

When you start having kids, it often becomes a hell of a lot trickier to thread this needle, based off of what I've heard. Sure, for some stuff you can play this game, but school supplies for example?

Though many of us likely can still try

If Amazon Prime lets me make semi-okay shopping choices without having to top up $17.98 shopping carts to $20, hey, that's a welcome way of clearing out the clutter. It creates more time to be "strategic" about things that really are strategic.

I've largely solved that problem by not buying things.