General Consumer Research

If you thought the holiday shopping season was over, you were wrong. Things are just getting started as people start making exchanges, spending gift cards and searching for post-holiday sales.

Gift cards made up nearly 18% of spending this season, higher than any other year and retailers saw it coming since gift cards were at the top of most people’s wish list .57% of retailers expected an increase in their sales, which means that they can still look forward to those cards being redeemed in the next month or two. Apparently, unlike me, most people actually spend their gift cards within 60 days of receiving them instead of keeping them in a drawer until they get found next July.

On the other hand, as shoppers start seeing December’s credit card debt turn up, it may keep some people at home. November’s credit carding spending was up 7% from last year although numbers aren’t available for December yet. Plenty of people are likely to make thriftiness their New Year’s resolution and retailers will have to put up some really impressive sales to lure shoppers. It’s a great time to keep an eye out for bargains and stock up on items that can be used all year round.

All of these factors contribute to make this a shopping season just as much as it was a month ago and it’s just as easy to get caught up in the moment. Like all things in life, this shopping season comes down to balance.

Gift card purchases feel like free stuff but they make it easy to end up justifying purchases that you would never make otherwise, especially expensive ones that are only partially paid for with gift cards. Post-holiday sales are also a great way to save some money in the long run but be careful to only buy things that you are sure you will use and would have to buy eventually anyway.

Happy shopping!

My new year’s resolutions are the same ones I’ve had three years running, which is not a good sign. However, I am learning the tricks and getting a little bit better every year. One of those tricks is that I’ve learned to make myself accountable to someone for each of my goals and to open myself up to criticism and feedback. In return I’m happy to nag friends, edit my sister’s college papers and generally criticize anyone who asks.

But a writer for Android Central pointed out that it would be in everyone’s best interest if we were to perform that service as consumers in addition to as friends and family members. Return policies for apps aren’t great and not just for Android devices. Therefore, users rely heavily on consumer reviews to choose whether or not to spend the time and money to download a new app. Developers look to the same reviews to find out what problems users have with the apps and where they can work on improving their products. But in order for that system to work, people need to actually sit down and review apps after they have used them.

The web version of Android Market has recently made reviews even more useful by allowing you to filter reviews by things like device or different versions of the app. Looks like even Google has been listening to feedback and working to improve things. This new feature means that reviews can be a really convenient tool but it’s up to us as users to make that happen.

This isn’t just true for Android apps though. Consumer-Rankings.com does a lot of research and can be very helpful but it’s impossible for us to check out the myriad of ways that every individual user out there will want to use a product. That is why we also ask for you as the consumer to add your two-cents to our opinions.

So don’t be shy: speak up!

I know, I know, here at Consumer Buzz we tend to tout the wonders of online services and I don’t renege on that. If it weren’t for the fact that I can do everything from my laptop, my house would be a disaster zone overrun with unsorted papers. Plus I still maintain that the greatest thing about modern technology is how often it allows me to keep my slippers on.  But every so often even we need to get off the computer and appreciate people who make the same efforts to get quality consumer products as we do and do it all wearing shoes.

Today is one of those days and the product we celebrate is one of those most threatened by the wonderful world of online everything: Pens. Even though we tend to chew on the ends, lose them behind the file cabinet and generally underappreciate their worth, there are people out there who are giving pens their proper respect.

The Fountain Pen Hospital in New York is a prime example. The establishment was opened in 1946 and at the time repairing broken fountain pens was the main business. The “hospital” section still operates underneath the store’s showroom and has drawers holding thousands of replacement parts for pens dating as far back as the 1920s. Today however, most of the Fountain Pen Hospital’s clientele are shoppers in the market for new specialty pens.

Pens can sell for as much as $30,000 for a solid gold fountain pen. Chaos, a pen designed by Sylvester Stallone featuring white gold serpents, swords and skulls, sells for $6,000.

True pen connoisseurs may subscribe to Pen World magazine and attend gatherings like the Los Angeles International Pen Show. Laura Chandler, editor of Pen World, tells of a couple who had been bidding against each other for years for select pens on eBay but later met at the Chicago Pen show and are now happily married. Presumably they have combined their pen collections and have teamed up to bid against other collectors.

Terry Weiderlight is the owner of the Fountain Pen Hospital, inherited from his father and grandfather. He doesn’t think that computers will be the end of his business. In fact, he owns a pen with ink on one side and an iPad stylus on the other. At the store, pens are displayed like jewelry in glass cases and that is how Weiderlight sees them. “A nice writing instrument for a man today is a status symbol,” he says, the equivalent of buying jewelry for a woman.

The store does have a facebook page and a website used by customers from all over the country. Which I guess brings us back to our own topic. Even pen collectors can appreciate staying in pajamas.

How much are you willing to spend to reduce your carbon footprint? Apparently, the extra $10,000 for an electric car crosses the line for most people and so the new lines of vehicles haven’t taken off as well as people had hoped.

With gasoline prices fairly stable these days it’s hard for people to justify the extra cost, especially since it comes along with some added inconvenience as well. The two major models are the Nissan Leaf and the Chevrolet Volt and they each have their issues. There are only a few places to recharge the Leaf, which means you’re limited to 73 miles before you have to be back at home. The Volt only goes 25 miles but can then switch to gas. However, there have been some safety concerns.

A lot of the buyers so far have been real electric car enthusiasts, people ideologically choosing them rather than those deciding that it makes financial sense. They, along with the car’s makers, aren’t ready to stop hoping yet. They say that these are just growing pains and things will pick up.

As consumers, we often end up choosing between what’s best for us as individuals as opposed to what’s best for mankind or the environment. What we buy, where and who we buy from are all political statements, not to mention statements about the cost we’re willing to pay for our beliefs.

That’s a lot of pressure. Add to it the fact that we’re inevitably being judged on our possessions. Even for a successful career, we need good looking clothes, business cards and websites, all of which cost money. To start raising your costs in order to do the best thing for the earth and society takes a serious commitment.

Like any commitment to a New Year’s resolution, it all comes down to balance. If I commit to eat only fruits and veggies for the whole year, I’ll fail three days in. But if I commit to eat salad a few times a week and to limit fries and ice cream to special occasions, there’s a good chance I’ll make it.

So now the question is, does an electric car count as once a week salad or a lifetime ban on chocolate? And I think that’s a very personal question.

Almost all of the news I get is free because I get it online and it’s paid for by advertising. But now, consumers may have the opportunity to get other things for free. A new company is giving users the option of viewing an ad instead of paying a fee at ATMs. This means I can stop wondering if it would be more economically sound to keep my money under my mattress. The ATMs wouldn’t be associated with any bank and the advertising money would cover the fee that you normally get charged for using an ATM belonging to a bank where you don’t have an account. There could still be fees from your bank for using an ATM that isn’t theirs, but it’s a good start.

The founder of Free ATMs NYC, who are installing the machines, say that a given transaction should take the same amount of time as it would without the ads and users will still have the option to pay a fee instead of viewing the ads.

I have to wonder who would choose that. I tend to be good at ignoring advertising (chalk it up to a mom who would NEVER buy the toys in the commercials) so I’m all for anything that gets rid of bank fees. On the other hand, I do wonder what could be next. How many services could I get for free if I’m willing to be advertised to? Besides our online news, TV and music which come with healthy doses of advertising a lot of web services, like the web designers we review, will give you a free trial in exchange for their logo prominently displayed on your site.

So little by little we are not only the targets of advertising but can easily become advertisers ourselves. When I put it this way, all of a sudden it sounds a bit creepy. On the other hand, I still like free stuff.

Let’s face it: if you haven’t finished your shopping and sent out your holiday cards by this time, it might just be too late. Starting to wish you were more organized and on top of this things? Or maybe you’re already starting to realize that you haven’t exercised as much as you meant to in preparation for the cake and cookies of the holiday season?

The time has come to give up and start thinking about next year. That’s right, it’s time to get started on New Year’s resolutions. Although Consumer-Rankings.com doesn’t have any in-depth reviews of these yet, I’ve got some recommendations for free sites that will help you stick to those resolutions for once.

I’ve excluded sites that help with specific goals, like weight loss, exercise, finances or quitting smoking. There are just way too many of them and I’d like to think that some of us have more creative and unique resolutions that may require more generic encouragement.

The most brilliantly simple site I found is hassleme.co.uk.  As an explanation, they’re tagline is “Because sometimes in life, you just need to be nagged…” Says it all, I think. You just type in what you want to be nagged about and approximately how often. They will then send you an email reminder to check if you’ve done what you were supposed to. The trick is that they don’t send the email completely predictably.  You never know when you’re going to be hit with that guilt inducing reminder, so you have to be ready for the surprise at all times.

The next site is for those of us who really need accountability and human encouragement in order to get anything done. Startaresolution.com assigns you a coach who is working on their own resolution and in turn assigns you to coach someone else via email and messages through the site. You earn points by being on the site, interacting with people and tracking your resolution.

My personal favorite is for those of us who are either very competitive or like to break our goals down into smaller tasks. On Joesgoals.com you can list as many resolutions as you’d like to work on and as many bad habits as you’d like to break. Every day, you mark off which daily goal you’ve achieved that day and which of your vices you’ve indulged in. Each of these gains or loses you a point and you can track your score over time, including your weekly and 30-day average. For those goals that may not be easily divided into daily tasks, you can also keep a log to record your progress even though it won’t add to your daily score.

Just looking at these sites has gotten me motivated, and now I just hope it lasts. Good luck!

Based on a survey of the infallible internet, the iPhone 4S is topping this year’s holiday tech wish list. It provides much of the same convenience as an iPad (Number two on the wish list) for a much more reasonable price. Not to mention that it can be used to make phone calls.

In fact, with all the handy apps and features, sometimes it is easy to forget that at the end of the day, it’s a phone. It says it right there in the name: iPhone.

And so today, I call on freethinkers everywhere to join with me in the (dubiously) important crusade: Change the name of the iPhone.

Really, it’s just embarrassing to my $20 cell to be classed with the shiny new iPhone 4S. My phone is filling its job description admirably. I have no problem with verbal communication at all. Not only can I make and receive calls, pick up voice-mails and save phone numbers, I can even send and receive text messages. Which for those of us unskilled at small talk, is not something to be undervalued as a technological advancement in the field of information exchange. As an added perk, I’ve got a couple of games which serve to keep me busy in long lines for the ladies’ room. I therefore consider my loyal cell phone to have gone above and beyond the call of duty.

I’m no luddite- I see the appeal of smartphones. I just have trouble classing them as phones. The phones of my youth have more in common with the crank phones you see in movies than with smartphones. If you ask any adult to draw a quick cartoon of a phone, it will inevitable be a large square-ish base with a number pad and a handset attached by a spiral cord.

So here’s the philosophical question I leave you to ponder today: At what point does a technology develop so far from its original design that we decide it’s an entirely different item?

I honestly don’t have an answer, I just know that I’m not ready to give up on my idea of the phone with the spiral cord.

As we mentioned last month, tablets are going to be a hot item this holiday season. But not all of us are willing to spend $500 on an iPad. According to an article in the New York Times, the good news is that the Kindle Fire is available at WalMart and Best Buy for $200. The bad news:  the Kindle Fire isn’t very good.

Amazon has been promising improvements with a software update becoming available in the next few weeks and a new version of the Fire being released in the Spring. The software update is expected to improve navigation and to provide better privacy settings. Critics say that it will take more than that to fix the device’s temperamental touch screen and inconvenient screen size. They say that it’s uncomfortable to view sites that are meant for larger tablets, let alone desktops and unless you have particularly slender and graceful fingers, you’re in trouble. Consumers who bought the product also complained that the volume and on/off switch were designed inconveniently and that web sites load slowly.

The one thing is does satisfactorily (although still not as well as the Kindle e-reader) is allow you to download books.

And now you’ve found the trick. While Amazon works to improve the Kindle Fire, they can still afford to keep selling the inferior product in the meantime. People will continue to buy it because of its price. Similarly, Amazon has started selling the original Kindle for around $80 at places like WalMart and Best Buy. At that price, they’re probably not even breaking even. But once the device is bought, its users will then turn to Amazon’s website to buy all of the media to fill it with.

Usually, the bad reviews and analyst condemnation would be enough to kill a product. But maybe because the device itself isn’t the money maker for Amazon it seems to be getting a second chance.

The question that remains to be answered however is whether or not the Kindle Fire can recover from a bad first impression. Amazon seems to be making the effort and with a $300 price difference between the Fire and the iPad, I would like to think it will make it.

As few would have predicted, the popularity of tablets has soared over the past year, changing media consumption and internet user behavior forever. With a plethora of apps and new devices entering the market over the course of 2011, this hot new product has gone from a geeky gadget in early adopter mode to mainstream consumer electronic in record time. That’s why it should come as no surprise that these sleek media devices are expected to outsell their heavier, bulkier, collapsible cousins this holiday season.

According a winter holiday shopping survey by PriceGrabber, tablets will be much more in demand than laptops this year. When consumers were asked whether they would rather receive a tablet or a laptop computer as a gift this year, an overwhelming 79 percent responded that they would rather receive a tablet. Additionally, 72 percent of shoppers also indicated that they believe tablets will replace e-readers as gifts this year. The main determining factors for this preference were portability, convenience and that oh-so-friendly touchscreen.  Also not surprising was the response provided by consumer when asked which tablet they preferred to receive as a gift. An astounding 83 percent said they preferred the Apple iPad.

While sales of laptops and e-readers are obviously expected to experience the greatest decline, there are other products that are sure to suffer as well. Computer peripherals, software, laptop bags and many others will also have decreased demand. While this may be bad news for laptop makers like Dell and Toshiba, it’s not necessarily a long term disaster. With some innovative thinking they can dominate this space next year. With the market for technology products moving as quickly as has been, next year’s tablets could be this year’s laptops.

With high unemployment rates and economic uncertainty on the minds of so many American consumers, many are looking for ways curb their gift spending this year. In a recent survey by TD Bank, 64% of those polled say they plan to purchase gift cards this year.

“With the majority of consumers looking to spend the same as last year, gift cards are a perfect option to keep holiday spending in check,” said Nandita Bakhshi, Executive Vice President, Head of Products, TD Bank. “Giving a gift card reduces shopping stress, you spend exactly what you intend to, and are less likely to get caught up in the season and spend more money than planned.”

In addition to helping consumers better control their holiday spending, gift cards also ensure that recipients get what they really need. Indeed, 51% of those polled said they would actually want to receive gift cards. This may be less related to people trying to avoid receiving unwanted gifts, and more an issue of managing household finances. Of those polled, 31% said they use gift cards they received on day-to-day expenses and 11% would use them on household and living expenses. This is very much a reflection of the financial difficulties many families face today. Imagine giving an expensive bottle of perfume or a video player to someone that is having trouble paying for their basic necessities. Giving such gifts could be seen as insensitive to their financial difficulties. Instead allowing them to choose how to use the money is a great way to bring them holiday cheer and possibly improving their financial situations.

If you feel that a gift card is just not intimate enough or does not have any sentimental value, there are ways to compensate. Consider writing a thoughtful note or throwing in the recipient’s favorite snack. The idea is not to take the fun or meaning out of holiday gift giving, but rather to be more practical and considerate. And at the end of the day, everyone will be better off.