Category: Just a Blog Post

My caliper takes a 357 battery. When the battery starts to get low, the readout starts flashing… It still reads out an accurate measurement though. When the battery gets real low.. it starts going bonkers as far as it’s zeroing. So you can zero it out and move the slide, and boom, it’s reading like half a meter or something.

So in the past I’d buy 357 batteries online. I won’t name names. And they’re fine but you have to buy 5 or 10 of them at a time. By the time one battery gets low, all the rest are getting old.. by the time you use 5 of them, they’re not lasting long.

So.. the alternative to buying 5 for like $4.99 and waiting a day or two, is to buy just one locally.

Ok, so there must be some kind of rush on these batteries, because all the local drug stores show them out of stock.. but anyway they’re charging like $7.49 if you buy one, and like $11 if you buy three. I found a drug store that claimed to have them in stock, at $14 for 3. Being desperate, I did an online order to pick it up. Got a text 10 minutes later.. sorry, order canceled we don’t have them.

When I check my favorite grocery store’s app they don’t even know what a 357 battery is.. but as we had to go to the store anyways, I stopped by their battery display… OK.. so there’s this A76 battery that looks just like a 357… I look it up online and yes, that’s a substitution for a 357. AND.. they sell them for $3.49! And they have a plentiful stock of them.

So it looks like, yes, I will definitely pay $3.49 for a single battery if I can have it right now, and don’t have to worry about buying so many of them they go stale.

So what’s the game with 357 batteries? If they had them in stock, I’m paying like twice as much, as if I call it an A76?

This may seem off topic for the blog lately, but actually this blog is generally about things to think about.

Well, everyone in the US knows the prices of groceries have gotten crazy. We do most of our shopping at a large regional chain store, and though they have a type of card to get discounts, usually the stuff we buy is not on discount. So it’s been pretty shocking the price we pay for so few items.

We go to another chain store for specific items that our main one doesn’t carry. Yesterday we ended up needing things at both stores, and as I really don’t like shopping, I don’t like going to two stores in a day. So we bought the special items plus some of the items we would have bought at our main store.

Well we used their discount card, they rung up the items, and wow, there was $12 in savings. That is considerable, and I thought, hey it must be cheaper to just shop all our groceries here, why go to the store that never discounts?

When we got home I took the receipt and got myself into a spread sheet, and went about proving to myself the store that discounts is the cheaper store. As I entered in the items and the prices for them at each store I noticed something…. The base price of almost all the items were more expensive at the store that just gave us the big discount. In some cases considerably more.

At the end of it the raw price total from the discounting store came much higher than the other store… by about $12. Yup… it’s a wash… They give you big discounts, but their base prices are higher, so it ends up being about the same.

I don’t like stores that play games like that… and I like that our main store just has lower prices in general on their items… and so we’ll continue only buying a couple special items at the other store.