Save Invest Retire

I have talked before about when I finally canceled cable. The troops were recently pushing hard to re-subscribe to cable, but a side effect I hadn’t really thought about saved me.

Now that the holiday season has arrived, questions my daughter get asked frequently are “what would you like for Christmas?” and “what would you like Santa to bring you this year?”

Formerly she had no trouble spilling out a laundry list of items, mainly Disney princess crap, that she wanted. Now she responds “I don’t know what I want because Daddy canceled cable.” Of course that response gives me a delightful frugal thrill when I hear it, but more importantly, I never really realized how profound an effect the marketing efforts of Disney and the other kid channels have on children.

The kid channels are well-crafted to teach children to become unthinking consumers and then wring every possible penny out of them. Shows, stars, and commercials are becoming indistinguishable due to product branding. Now a kid star is promoted across as many forms of media as possible and children are indoctrinated before they have the ability to recognize and resist what is being done the them. The easiest answer to that problem is don’t let them watch the shows and the easiest way to do that is: cancel cable!

When Mrs. A heard little A’s response, she abandoned her cable lobbying. The part I haven’t shared with her yet is that when little A was recently pressed for a Santa request, she asked Santa to bring something for her Mommy. That’s a far cry from last holiday season, when every commercial on the Disney channel was greeted with an “I want that!”

That’s right, you can save a lot of money by avoiding the replacement razor blade scam perpetuated on the shaving public. Let me explain:

First, I picked up an old-fashioned safety razor at the flea market for two bucks. The design is similar to this one:

This thing is pretty simple: you rotate the base and the top opens, allowing you to place a double edge razor blade inside. After closing it, you have a razor which allows you to shave with a different edge on both sides.

The razor itself is not where you save money, however. After all, the razor and blades business model has long dictated selling razors at a loss to make all their profit on the blades. Razor manufacturers, once the patents on their latest razor model run out, bring out a new model to keep a monopoly on their proprietary replacement blades.

The classic safety razor is the solution to the outrageously priced proprietary blades. I stopped at the local Walmart to pick up a pack of blades. I glanced at the 10-packs of the currently marketed razor blades from the big manufacturers and the prices ranged from around $15-$23 per ten blades. In other words, anywhere from $1.50 to $2.30 per blade. For me, at an average cost of $2 per blade, that means I used to spend maybe $50 or so a year just on shaving blades.

I bought a ten pack of double edge blades at a total cost of $1.54, or 15 cents per double-sided blade. That’s a new cost per year of less than $4, down from $50.

I gave them a test spin and found they did a fine job at a cost of less than 1/10th what I was previously paying. I did find that shaving with the safety razor requires you to keep your wrist more rigid, but other than that, everything went very smooth, including the final result.

For some tips on the old-fashioned shaving approach, try here.