Rampant Consumerism

I love online shopping. Here are some of my favourite Internet destinations.

Sunday, May 24, 2009 , the wee hours

Trader Joe’s dog and cat food

We’ve been doing a lot of shopping at Trader Joe’s lately. We started doing it with the mindset of “quality over quantity”, but quickly found out they’ve got pretty good prices on many things. They’ve also got the variety that we crave so much, and since we started to shop there fairly regularly a couple of months ago, we’ve been almost entirely vegetarian, eating meat perhaps once a month when we have a craving for something specific (check Flippy’s blog for some of our favourite TJ’s stuff). I guess I was bound to end up in their pet food aisle one day, reading labels and checking prices, and I was pretty impressed by what I found. Their canned dog food contains meat, lots of identifiable meat (from chicken to lamb to beef) and none of those nasty “wheat middlings” or “corn gluten”. It’s not human grade food, and it still looks/smells like dog food, but the label is better than anything you’ll read from Alpo or Pedigree or Iams, and the food is less expensive. A 20 oz. can is 99 cents, whereas that’s often the regular price of a 13 oz. can of crappier food. If you used canned dog food for anything, even snacks or pilling, I think this food is a good buy.

I also checked out the dry dog food, and if you just consider the cost (approx. $1/lb.) it’s good food. Nothing fancy, and it won’t hold up if you’re comparing it to Solid Gold or Wellness or something more in the $3/lb. range. However, it again contains a small number of ingredients, and is primarily made of chicken and chicken meal. The senior food contains small amounts of glucosamine, chondroitin, and omega 3 & 6 fatty acids… not enough to truly count as a sole source of those things, but at least they’re making an effort. In contrast, I picked up a cheap bag of store brand dog food at Target and the ingredient list is horrifying: beet pulp, animal fat, corn, soy, wheat, bone meal, and just about anything and everything that isn’t edible by humans. If you’re on a budget and feeding a dry dog food, I think you can feed the TJ’s brand without guilt. Our two large dogs have always eaten dry food as their main diet (simply because of the expense of feeding raw/homemade to 200 lbs. of dog), but I always supplement the food with something like eggs, cheese, tofu, sweet potato, raw chicken wings, or whatever leftovers we don’t feel like eating (the dogs enjoy both spaghetti and chili). While I’d prefer to be feeding them Wellness Super 5 Mix or something similar, I feel okay about the TJ’s food.

Probably the best of TJ’s pet foods is their canned cat food. All meat, no by-products, no carbs, and only 59 cents per 5.5. oz. can. It might be the best hidden cat food bargain available, although again, it’s not anything like Merrick or Spot’s Stew or homemade (where the ingredients are human grade and identifiable). TJ’s also has canned tuna made just for cats, and the only ingredients are tuna and water. It’s terribly stinky stuff, and so dark that it must be made with unimaginable parts of the fish, but it is tuna! The label claims it’s a complete diet, although I can’t find any references to added taurine or other vitamins, so I think I’d just feed it as an occasional treat and not as a sole food.

Sadly, there seems to be a stinker in the TJ’s pet food family: the dry cat kibble. It doesn’t have a perfect list of ingredients (there are some corn products), but it starts with chicken and chicken meal, so that makes it better than any of the staple cat foods you find on grocery store shelves (stuff like Fancy Feast, Meow Mix, Cat Chow, etc.). I bought a bag to use for the “kibble hunts” we do a couple of times a week, and it was a disaster: almost every cat got diarrhea from eating about a tablespoon of this food, and Chelsea refused to eat it completely (smart cat). Our cats seem to have pretty strong stomachs because they eat both homemade and whatever we’ve had donated, so eating a new kibble isn’t an unusual thing, but we’ve never seen this kind of stomach upset before. The only cat it didn’t seem to bother was our foster cat, Kevin, but after a couple more small servings of it even he started to have the runs. I thought of using up the rest of the bag by feeding our porch cats with it but couldn’t bring myself to do it because of all the bad reactions we’d seen amongst our own cats, so the bag still sits in a cabinet, open and unused. I’m going to contact TJ’s about it in case there’s a problem with the case lot but I can’t find anyone else reporting problems about it… I think our cats just can’t eat it.

I’d really like to hear from anyone else who’s fed Trader Joe’s dry cat food (I bought the chicken flavour), to find out if you had the same experience. I don’t care if you find this entry two years from now, I still want to know!

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 05/24 at 12:23 AM
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Monday, January 19, 2009 , late afternoon

Shopping at Trader Joe’s

For Christmas we were given a bit of money, which we decided to use on a shopping spree at Trader Joe’s. While the food there isn’t overly expensive, it’s not really a place where it’s practical for us to shop, and we find that we end up buying a lot of items which would otherwise be considered “luxuries”. A few things we purchased ended up being incredibly wonderful, and I have to recommend that you try the Spicy Spinach Flatbread pizza (add grated parmesan), green chile and cheese tamales, the frozen chocolate croissants (you let them rise and cook them yourself), the raspberry creme brulee, fresh scones (if they’re available at your store—I enjoy both the current and lingonberry), and the peach/blueberry panna cotta (yes, we like our desserts!). We also really enjoyed the strawberry kefir, which was like a yogurt smoothie, and supposedly quite healthy. I can’t recommend the Olympiad Greek pizza… blech. It was supposed to be roasted peppers, olives, feta, and mozzarella, but it was was so lacking flavour that it wasn’t much different than a REALLY cheap frozen generic pizza. In fact, that’s what both Flippy and I thought it tasted like… crappy frozen pizza, like the kind available thirty years ago. We were also torn about the Ham and Gruyere flatbread “pizza” that we tried—the crust was very thin, flaky, and tasty, but the cheese ended up being really greasy and a bit overwhelming. It was a nice taste combination which just didn’t present very well.

I guess TJ’s can be happy that we only had complaints about two items, and otherwise, we’ll buy all the other products again. We still have beef/red chile tamales in the freezer, as well as little escargot brioches that we need to try.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 01/19 at 05:50 PM
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Wednesday, October 17, 2007 , terribly early in the morning

History Book Club

I love books, and was an easy target when the History Book Club sent me an invitation to join. Surprisingly, the books offered weren’t just about history; they had sports books, reference books, and even a couple of kids books. I bought a gift for my niece, and for us, I purchased an Oxford dictionary, a two-volume reference manual of mythology, and a couple of others which slip my mind right at this second. If you have family and friends who enjoy reading, it’s a great place to browse for gifts. The introductory offer at this moment is 4 books for $1 each, plus shipping and handling… it averages out to $4 per book. You also have the option of buying a fifth book at half price.

Oh, one more thing… you don’t have to make any further purchases in the book club after this initial offer. In fact, you can cancel your membership immediately if you want. It’s a pretty good deal.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 10/17 at 03:44 AM
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Saturday, September 29, 2007 , terribly early in the morning

Flippy needs a new pair of free shoes

Flippy just sent me an email about how to win a free pair of shoes or a t-shirt from Ryka. You basically just click this link to go to the Ryka contest page, and then you register with your name, address, email addy, and your shoe and shirt size. Every day, Ryka randomly draws names to give away 50 free pairs of shoes, and 50 free t-shirts.

Flippy and I won free tennis shoes about six years ago, via some promotion. I think you just went to some website and asked for free shoes and then they sent them to you… ah, the wild and crazy youthful days of the Internet. We found out about the current contest because one of Flippy’s blog buddies has already won some cool Ryka shoes, so c’mon… I need one of my blog buddies to win shoes, too!

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 09/29 at 03:00 AM
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Sunday, July 15, 2007 , the wee hours

Bissell SpotBot

I spotted this online, and developed a crush:

It’s a Bissell SpotBot, and I dream of having one to clean up dog vomit, dog pee, cat vomit… and spilled red wine from all the garden parties we host. Does anyone have one, and can you report back on how well it works? I do a fine job of stain removal with OxyClean, towels, and elbow grease, but I do love a handy gadget.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 07/15 at 02:25 AM
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Tuesday, January 31, 2006 , early afternoon

Online shopping is da bomb

We do almost all our shopping online. We even have our groceries delivered now, and I love the convenience of browsing through stores and products while sitting in my pajamas and sipping tea. I also fine online shopping is great because you can find incredibly obscure, one-of-a-kind things, like rare books and toys. Here’s a small list of stores at which I often spend my money: