Why a small children’s party is as good, if not better than a large party

by Jillian @ http://blueshelled.com . May 24, 2009 . 4:21PM

Today, I was reading Jen’s blog (which, if you haven’t read it, you should) on her child’s birthday party and the quandary she is in due to the creativity of her son and his having invited most of the school and the neighboring 3 counties (my author liberty) to his birthday party.

When I finished reading I laughed. And laughed and laughed and laughed. Better her than me, I thought to myself. Jen will likely defriend me at this point, and rightfully so, as I should be commiserating with her, but in the age of Chuck-e-Cheese, I’m just thankful I didn’t get roped into this particular dilemna.

AJ has never had a large party. When I go to adult parties, other parents are very quick to judge me when I state this fact. The response is usually a tightening of the lips, a shake of the head and a “but, don’t you think he’s missing out?” or some equally insane statement. If you just relaxed your lips, stopped shaking your head and closed your mouth, then we need to talk in a very serious way.

As a toddler, a big party would have been more for the adults. Consider the statement “Aw, look at all the cute little ones in their cute little pointy hats and their faces all smooshed with cake. Isn’t it precious?” That cute, precious, pointy party would have cost about $200 and he would have ended up with a bunch of presents that would have put people out of grocery money. For the $200, we could buy him presents and those people could buy their groceries. So, we chose to have small parties, spend less than $25 (usually) on a party for him, us, family and close friends and spend a bit on presents (not $200, for the record).

As he gets older, now 8, we still don’t do big parties. This year, we asked what he would like to do on his birthday. He chose to see a movie. That gets expensive with many people, so the compromise was that he could choose ONE friend to take to the movie and then we’d do the bells and whistles for them: ANYTHING they wanted from the snack bar and they got to pick any G rated movie they wanted to see. You would think they died and went to high fructose corn syrup heaven. Before the movie, they went to the McDonald’s and ate dinner and played in the playland for two hours. AJ said it was “the best birthday ever!” and so did his friend.

By keeping his party expectations low, we don’t have to worry about upsets. Sure, he like attending birthday parties, but he also is an introvert who likes a small get together, too. He’d rather have presents and get to do whatever he wants on his day than a 2 hour party.

Another family we know did something similar. They did the big Chuck-e-Cheese party, but they invited family and they allowed their child to choose one kid to come as a guest (AJ) and so they saved money on tokens and all the extras and the child still got the special feeling that a kid gets from doing all the birthday stuff at Chuck-e-Cheese.

To Jen, what about doing a lollipop lottery? Get some dum dums and whoever gets the dum dums with a mark on them gets to come to your 3-4 person party? To everyone else, I’m just glad I’m still worrying about this kind of thing instead of beer parties.

Cell phone carriers restricting customer phone options?

by Jillian @ http://blueshelled.com . May 23, 2009 . 5:56PM

Luckily for T-mobile, I’m not a customer, or I would take the 45 minutes it would likely take me to get through to their customer service and give them an earful after reading an article on consumerist.com. Apparently, as consumers, we are no longer allowed to buy our phones where we choose and we must buy them from the carrier itself or risk some kind of ominous unknown threat. I’m not sure what the threat is, but Meg Marco notes:

When the salesperson was ringing me up, she started trying to set up the phone. I told her not to worry about it because I wasn’t going to be using it as a pre-paid phone, but I was going to put my own SIM card in there. She got really quiet and sad that she would “have to pretend that I didn’t hear that.”

You’re going to pretend you didn’t hear that? Or what? Are you going to terminate your contract with me? At what cost? Unless you find a way to make phones indestructible, phones are going to break and things are going to happen and unless replacement policies get better, people are going to say “screw your new phones, I’m getting a used one until my 2 years is up.”

Recently, I did this when my LG Voyager just wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. There was nothing wrong with it other than I hated the phone. It wasn’t intuitive and the excessive amount of money I would need to pay for each and every application made me realize that it was just another cash cow for my phone carrier. I reluctantly went back to the blackberry, buttcalls and all. Frankly, I’ve never been happier in my life. The little Pink Pearl telephone I got off of craigslist is smaller than most blackberries and I feel bad that I didn’t listen to my friend, Clay, when he told me years ago that the pearl was the way to go. For having large man hands, my palms are surprisingly small and this is a nice fit for me.

However, if Verizon had suddenly made some snide comment that I could not use the pearl, which is one of their recognized phones or that they “hadn’t heard that I got it off of craigslist” I would have been inclined to shoot fire out of my mouth at the rep because a phone carrier may carry my service, but I’m not required to keep the same phone I bought with the plan and, if I were, I’d go elsewhere. If I wanted to buy a pay by the minute phone to stick a Sim card in (for carriers that use them), I should be able to do so with a rep that cheerfully offers to help me because this is like any other business and a paying customer is a paying customer.

Have these people never heard about “giving ‘em the pickle?” Giving ‘em the pickle is a customer service technique which means going above and beyond the call of duty to gain and keep customers. It’s explained on the linked website, but the key is that if you can make your customers happy by giving them pickles for their sandwiches, why would you deny them something so small? T-mobile, you were still making money from this? Why would you deny this person something so small or encourage your reps to make others feel bad based on what they afford to get by? Hopefully, someone out there is rethinking this policy because it seems like losing customers over pre-paid cells is a silly policy.

Update on airline charges:

by Jillian @ http://blueshelled.com . May 9, 2009 . 5:58AM

Remember my post on shoddy airline practices? Well, it’s not just US Airways. I’ve flown Delta many times in the past and have always had great customer service, but this policy is CRAZY. Delta is now going to charge $125 for bag 3 and $200 for bags 4-10 per flight.

According to http://consumerist.com:

Unfortunately for Bradley, the information is on Delta’s site, but it’s separated into a page by itself under the heading “excess baggage.” This is where you can find out what sort of gouging they’re going to do if you exceed the norm of 2 bags—and where it says that bag 3 will cost $125, and bags 4-10 will cost $200 each.

SAY WHAT? Ok, I rarely bring my 2 bags that I’m allowed. So, since I do that, can I get a bag credit to save up for times I might require extra bags? Or how about a cheaper ticket for those of us who don’t need bags? I understand the need to limit the number of bags as they can only hold so much stuff and there must be room for all the passengers as well as their goods, but the charges here are overboard. If people could afford those prices, would they really fly Delta or would they have their own personal jet for travel?

I’m not going to dwell on this or make this into a full blog entry. However, if I’m going to yell at US Airways, it’s only fair to yell at Delta, too, for shady, shoddy practices.