Today I added an Amazon Store to Babies with Glasses. I'd been registered as an Amazon affiliate for some time, but never got around to doing anything with it. Today I set up the store and added what I thought are quality "Babies with Glasses"-themed items as well as lots of parenting and pregnancy books. I was suprised to find an abundance of children's books on the topics of needing glasses and/or patching and placed most of the highest-rated ones in the store as well. Hopefully this will bring in a little revenue (I think we'll get 4% of each purchase, or something like that) to help cover hosting costs.

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All you bargain shoppers out there should check out the Black Friday Ads website. It contains lists of all the great deals retailers have on the days after Thanksgiving (AKA Black Friday). The site has lists of some of the best deals from each store plus downloadable pdfs of scans of the actual advertisements. It also appears that other great deals are posted there throughout the year. I've already got my eye on some electronics bargains.

Speaking of great deals, here are two RSS feeds that will keep you up-to-date on the best deals at both web and brick-and-mortor stores:

• Ben's Bargains
• Deal News

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I went ahead and picked up a refurb/return Silvia from 1st-Line Equipment. I've always been a big fan of refurbishedd items - all of the quality, most of the warranty and a lot of savings (usually what ever could go wrong, has gone wrong and it's been fixed)! It'll pair nicely with the refurbished Rocky I bought last week. All together I'll have saved over $200 by going the refurb route... potentially more if there's a price increase.

I was very happy with my buying experience with 1st-Line so far. Jim (the owner) responded to all my pres-sale questions rather quickly, their prices are GREAT and their rewards & customer loyalty programs are pretty nice too. I've actually earned enough reward points to buy some nice accessories from them in the future. They also have a sort-of teired price system, for example - the Rancilio water softner is less expensive if you bought your machine from them then if you bouight it elsewhere - a great way to reward customer loyalty. They also stock some hard-to-get accessories and require you to have purchased your machine from them in order to qualify to buy them. I'm sure they'll make exceptions on a case-by-case basis if you sound desperate/pitiful enough!

I'll probably go ahead and get a PID with the money I saved buying refurb, and use my Whole Latte Love gift certificate to buy some accessories when I get back stateside.

On a related note, I was talking with some of my coworkers today regarding the struggling dollar. One of the guys was planning on buying some Glock pistols early in the new year, now - he's considering getting them before the new year since they may go up first qaurter 2008 (he already knows exactly what he wants, so the "shopping" part's done).

It'll be interesting to see how many things go up after the first of the year. I'm particularly curious about the auto industry. Could be a "positive feedback loop" kind of thing... Price of imported cars (and everything else) go up due to struggling dollar, consumers buy more American made cars (and other stuff) becuase it's all they can afford, increased consumption of domestic products increases US economy, value of dollar goes up and we're back to where we started from until some other factor starts devaluaing the dollar again. Well, at least that's what my faith in the US economy has me hoping for (and apparently Warren Buffet's since Berkshire Hathaway just put some serious capital into the US industrial sector this week). Good thing my portfolio (which includes BRK.B) is diversified just in case!

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