An inquisitive old fart with a camera
No, I still don’t have my Goldmoney debit card. From Toronto, it went to London, Then Dubai.Then — drum roll, please — Miami. Now apparently in Buenos Aires.
Doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. If it’s ever actually delivered, let’s hope it works. Goldmoney, if you’re listening — this is pathetic.
I recently ordered a gold debit card from Goldmoney. The idea is that you own gold, but can sell gold grams to fund a fiat currency card (USD, EUR, GBP, etc). I imagined a scenario such as standing in line at Tienda Inglesa when the price of gold is $4,000/ounce and going up $10 every half hour, tapping instructions into my cell phone to fund the card, then spending the fiat moments later.
Alas, it’s not that fast. Currently takes about a day to transfer the funds (why?).
Why? Well, also why should a card from Canada be en route to Uruguay through Dubai?
Some time ago, while a friend was in the Untied Snakes, I shipped to him from Amazon a little humidity monitor. Only a few ounces. He had offered to bring things back. Over the years my “need” for goodies from up north has diminished. But this seemed useful, and I’d never seen one here.
No sooner had it shipped from Amazon than there it was in Tienda Inglesa, similar model for more or less the same price. I didn’t buy it, because I didn’t need two. However, with our little unoccupied chacra house, I’ve recently been watching for mold, so carrying this one back and forth. Hey, maybe it would make sense to have two after all.
So this morning I went to Tienda Inglesa with a mission, and no, they don’t have them any more. I thought, well, this is typical of a very small market! The population of Uruguay is 1% that of the Untied Snakes. So people coming here from there have to be aware — hey, wait a minute, where I have experienced this before? Costco and Sam’s Club, where some stuff is always there, but other stuff you grab because it’s unusual and probably won’t be stocked again.
Hmm. Okay. No particularly profound economic observation here. I do see one similar in Mercado Libre (~eBay) for 50% more. Fair enough.
I’m reminded of my first trip back over the border after moving to Mexico in 2007, where high priority was some LED flashlights, which weren’t available locally. I stood in Tarzhay, befuddled by a seemingly endless selection, finally buying two or three. And returned to find LED flashlights — one or two models only, but hey — in Walmart in Morelia, Michoacán.
P.S. — yes, we have no Malwart in Uruguay, but Tienda Inglesa was recently purchased by whoever owns Safeway and Albertson’s. Entonces, ya veremos.
We bought a used gas barbecue grill without a functioning lighter. So I bought one of these for a few bucks. I was amazed how quickly it ran out of gas. Taking it apart, I see that, even though it has room for a regular lighter’s worth of gas, they’ve made the tank smaller. Because they can. Because you can’t see it. What a rip!
So I’m back to turning on the gas and throwing a match through grill. *POOOMP*
I must admit, my first post from two years ago now strikes me as sort of silly, because the nesting ice trays design now seems quite clever rather than flawed.
And perhaps my second post, almost a year ago, struck some people* as somewhat silly, when I considered it a miracle to find ice trays that worked and didn’t break. (FWIW, I kinda still do.)
Well, here you go, muchachos, the orange plastic ice trays from Disco in Carrasco (Montevideo), almost a year later, still releasing ice cleanly (85% of the time) and not breaking.
OK, not exactly a miracle, but feels like one after buying plastic ice trays that start breaking within a few days: orange ones purchased at Disco supermarket.
Even after ten days in the land of low prices / high expectations (that would be ‘Murka; Uruguay being the land of high prices / low expectations), I still joy in something as simple as cheap orange ice trays that eject intact ice cubes — the entire tray! — and have shown no sign of cracking after several weeks.
I had never seen anything like this before Uruguay. Obviously, the one time (you learn quickly) you stick a full ice tray into the freezer on top of another freshly placed ice tray facing the same way, you end up with a mess.
So why would someone design something so unpleasant for the user?
I know (from experience with other products) that were I to take this to customer service at Tienda Inglesa to point out the user-unfriendly design, the girls there would simply explain to me how to stack them “properly.”
If you live in Uruguay, you have to get used to the idea that there exists very little expectation that goods will be well-designed, well-made, or durable. The amazing thing about these lavender-colored ice trays, however, is that they haven’t broken, and most of the time ice doesn’t stick to them. Unlike the red and blue ones, which yield shattered ice only with a struggle, and tend to break in short order.
Discovering how well they worked (stacked “properly”), I went back to get more. And found only red and blue ones. And have never seen the lavender ones again.