Let’s talk about HEB’s SHIPT and why you should avoid them at all costs

Tags

HEB, shipt.com, Walmart Grocery

I’ve long been a fan of the Wal-mart grocery pickup since it first came to my area. But recently I heard about a new service, that makes grocery shopping even easier. Instead of having to get in your car and go all the way to the store to pick up the groceries you were too lazy to shop for, this new service from HEB will deliver them right to your front door. That is my kind of lazy!

Unlike Walmart grocery, HEB’s grocery shopping service charges you a monthly fee, whether you use it or not.

You can pay $99 a year or $8.25 a month.

If I agreed to pay the full year upfront, the $99 fee, they said they would give me a two-week trial and if I wasn’t happy I could cancel anytime. Luckily for me, I selected that option so this whole fiasco didn’t cost me a thing.

Well by not costing me a thing I meant the monthly fees from this service.

I signed up for the service and went right to work at placing my grocery order. I found that most items were slightly more expensive that Walmart grocery. For example, they charge $.29 per banana whereas Walmart charges .$19.

That still wasn’t a big deal for me. After I selected my items I attempted to place my order.  I pressed the GET IT SHIPT! button and nothing appeared to happen, in reality, it did – as it charged my account, only I just didn’t know it. I tried again and it said my card and it said it was declined. I had recently moved so I wondered if it were a problem with my zip code. I tried again and again it said my card was declined. That’s a total of 3 times being declined.

I then changed cards and used another account. Again it appeared to do nothing so I pressed submit again after waiting a fair amount of time. It said I didn’t select a delivery time, so I assumed logically oh that’s why nothing happened the first time. I selected a delivery time, then pressed submit and again it failed.

I won’t continue to bore you with all the details. In all, they ended up charging my accounts a total of 7 times.

Declined usually means they couldn’t charge my account because the bank refused the transaction for a variety of reasons. However, that isn’t apparently what it meant to this computer.

$902.90 later, I still didn’t have any groceries. I freaked. These people just took $902.90 out of my checking accounts (I have two of them), and they still didn’t even complete my order.

When I went to speak to their support, they informed me they can’t refund my money because the charges were declined on my bank’s end and the bank has my money. Yes, I swear that’s word for word what he told me.

I tried to explain that I’m looking at my computer screen and I can see every transaction that they charged me for.

The bank had put a temporary hold on the account thinking it might be fraud but when I said, no I shopped at HEB’s SHIPT today, they cleared the transactions, all 7 of them.

Now I’m sitting here with $902.90 taken out of my checking account and still no groceries.

Who charges someone 7 times for groceries? Well apparently HEB does.

The customer service rep named James then tells me that the reason for the problem is that they are a new company, under 2 years old so the banks are suspicious of them.

I wanted to say dude no, the banks are suspicious of you because you keep banging out your customer’s credit cards.

In the end, after trying to deal with James for almost half an hour I gave up. Instead, I called my bank back and had a long talk with them about what happened. They confirmed the charges did, in fact, go through that the security hold on my card had in fact been lifted when I confirmed the charges were legit but they ended up doing 7 chargebacks for me because the company themselves wouldn’t cooperate.

The good news is, it’s a big deal for a new company with a new merchant account to get a chargeback and they just got 7 of them. Not only are they charged $25 to $35 per transaction that got chargebacked but they also get a big hit on their account and that means that if their percentage of chargebacks goes above 1% or 2% (depending on the bank), they will lose their merchant account altogether, meaning they can’t process credit cards anymore for anyone.

For an online company that depends on the ability to process credit cards to survive, that’s a big deal.

I will eventually get my $900 back from my bank, but it may take up to 72 hours. I only hope that in that time no other charges come through which could cause me to bounce a check.

My conclusion is that HEB sucks and SHIPT.COM sucks even more! Stick with Walmart grocery and save yourself the hassle and the money.

 

 

 

More Township App Tips on Making Money

Tags

Bread, Carrots, Corn, Cotton, Farming, Game, Jasmine, Mobile App, Money, Strawberries, Sugar, Township, Wheat

We previously talked about how to make money on the Township app. Usually, when I play these downloadable games on my phone, I get bored of them in a few days or even a few weeks, but months later and I’m still absolutely in love with this game.

Once you get into the higher levels of the game it does become easier to make money but it also becomes a struggle to manage your barn (inventory) size. But if you can keep that in check and stop hoarding goods, like me, you should be fine.

Right now what we are going to do is some farming math. Previously I mentioned how you should always be doing something to make money. Like farming …. plant wheat, grow it, sell it, repeat.

Plant 1 Wheat for 0 coins. Sell it for 1 coin. Wheat takes 2 minutes to grow.

You can plant 1 Jasmine for 25 coins and sell them for 37 coins. While you get more profit per plant with Jasmine it takes much longer to grow, 3 hours and 30 minutes. So the question is, which is really the fastest way to make money?

The answer is, you make about 0.000139 gold coins per second with wheat and 0.000001 with Jasmine. In other words, you make .000138 gold coins per second more by planting wheat than you do Jasmine.

It’s 5 times more profitable to grow strawberries than Jasmine. And even more profitable to grow Corn. Let’s look at a chart.

Item	Min	Sec	Profit	Profit per Min
Wheat	2	120	1	0.008333
Jasmine		12600	12	0.000952
Strawberry	60	3600	6	0.001667
Corn	5	300	2	0.006667
Carrot	10	600	3	0.005000
Sugar	20	1200	4	0.003333
Cotton	30	1800	5	0.002778
Bread		345	5	0.014493

If you look at the chart above you will see that wheat is the most profitable item per minute, then corn, then carrot, then sugar, then cotton, then strawberry and then jasmine coming in last. Those are the raw items.

But if you take those raw items and make something with them, that’s when the profit really heats up.

It takes a total of 345 seconds to make a single loaf of bread, that is because of course, first you have to grow the wheat, and then make it into bread. But even with the extra time it still brings you the most money per second — 0.014493

With corn, you make a measly 0.006667 gold coins per second of your time. But that doesn’t work out for everything. You actually make more money per second by growing corn and selling it outright than by turning it into chips. It takes 3 corn to make a chip and 345 seconds. In the end, you profit 0.005 for selling that chip but you would have profited 0.006 by selling the corn as soon as you grew it.

What about on the really high end? Like silk … It takes a long time to grow raw silk, 15 hours (or 54,000 seconds) and in the end that works out to be a profit of 0.000241 gold coins per second. If you take that silk and make it into fabric, that will take you an amazing 58,320 seconds, but you’ll make far more money per second which is 0.001715. Still, not enough to really be worth your time though.

So I guess what we really learned from all of this is, even at higher levels the best way to make money is still planting wheat. Only instead of selling it outright, take some of it and turn it into bread, then sell that bread as fast as you can make it.

It seems to be the most money you’ll make per second in the game.

Yes, you’ll make good money in your zoo. But I’m talking about the fastest, most reliable way. The zoo only allows you to sell specific (random) items and only in very limited quantities. Right now I can sell an ear of corn for 5 gold instead of 3 but I can only sell 5 ears of corn at a time at that price. I have to wait 15 minutes to sell 5 more ears of corn at that higher price. While a great bonus, it’s still not enough to really be my main source of income.

** By the way don’t forget to activate your harvest bonus so all the prices I mentioned are now doubled since you will harvest 2 items at a time instead of just the one.

The most profitable items are —

• Bread – .869 gold coins per minute or 52.173 per hour
• Wheat – .5 (half a gold coin) per minute or 30 gold coins an hour
• Corn – .4 gold coins per minute or 24 gold coins per hour
• Chips – .3018 gold coins per minute or 52.173 gold coins per hour
• Carrots – .3 gold coins per minute or 18 gold coins per hour
• Rose Jam = .200 gold coins per minute or 12.045 gold coins per hour

If you like this post please shrae it with your friends and leave a comment below if you have any questions about the game itself.

 

 

Let’s talking about The Good Witch

Tags

90210, Bailee Madison, Hallmark Channel, Netflix, Samantha Gracie, The Good Witch

I came across a show on Netflix called The Good Witch. From the first episode, I was hooked. It’s a great little TV series, light-hearted fun. What I couldn’t believe is that it was based on a made for TV movie that was so popular, they made 6 more!

1. The Good Witch (2008)
2. The Good Witch’s Garden (2009)
3. The Good Witch’s Gift (2010)
4. The Good Witch’s Family (2011)
5. The Good Witch’s Charm (2012)
6. The Good Witch’s Destiny (2013)
7. The Good Witch’s Wonder (2014)

The crazy part is, as much as I love romantic movies, I hadn’t ever heard of The Good Witch or any of the follow-up movies. How is that even possible considering they were the highest rated shows on the Hallmark channel.

Some of the things that bother me …

They tend to say “on the house” all the time. How exactly do these small businesses in this very tiny town stay in business when every time you turn around you hear them say “on the house”.

Another thing that bothered me was in season 2 they introduced a girl named Katie. She goes to school with Grace. They are supposed to be the same age, but clearly, they aren’t. Katie is in fact, 9 years older than Grace in real life. It shows and it’s bad. It’s sort of a 90210 Andrea Zuckerman moment.

A 16-year-old in high school played by someone who is almost 30, is just flat out retarded. There are so many younger girls who they could have cast in this minor part, why cast a nearly 30-year-old woman to play a 16-year-old child? It’s ridiculous.

This is Gracie, the character who plays the 16-year-old. She’s 18 in real life but clearly looks like a little 16-year-old girl. Nothing like the nearly 30-year-old from above.

Okay sorry, that rant over. 😛

I honestly love this TV show. It’s not magical in the same way that Charmed was. It’s far more subtle. It’s more about love and family and the people in the small town than it really is about anything to do with magic.

If you were like me and haven’t seen it yet, I high recommend you check out the TV series. The first two seasons you can see on Netflix and season 3 is currently airing on the Hallmark channel.

 

 

A Fistfull of Futurama Dollars

Tags

Comedy Central, Fox, Futurama

I was binge watching Futurama on Netflix when the episode called “A Fishful of Dollars” came on. In this episode, Fry realizes his old bank still exists and goes to see if his account was still good. In the year 2,000, he had a balance of $0.93. It’s now 1,000 years later and they said that at an average of 2.25% interest over 1,000 years, his new balance was $4.3 billion.

I was just curious, for whatever reason, how much money he would really have.

Turns out the answer is actually $4,283,508,449.71. That means the writers of the show actually did the math. I’m impressed at their attention to detail.

Futurama was such a great show. I hate that it ended.

For those who don’t know, Futurama is an award winning animated TV series that was on the air from March 28, 1999 – September 4, 2013. That’s 7 seasons and 140 episodes.

At first Futurama was on Fox, fro m1999 to 2003. But then it was canceled. When in syndication it did so well, Comedy Central picked it up from 2008-2013. The writers said in 2013 they would try hard to find a new home for the series but to date that has not happened.

 

I don’t get ScentBird – Let’s Do the Math!

Tags

Arquiste, Brit Sheer, Burberry, Carven Le Parfume, Carven Parfumes, Commodity, Dolce, Dolce & Gabbana, Gold Perfume, Scent Bird, ScentBird.com, The Architects Club

I don’t get ScentBird, the monthly box subscription service for high-end perfumes. I can’t imagine spending $14.95 a month just for perfume, so I decided to do some math.

Moschino Fresh Couture sells for about $32 online which is 3.4 fluid ounces (100.5 ML). This works out to be about $9.41 an ounce. So why would I pay ScentBird $14.95 and get a .27 oz (8 ml) bottle?

Some argue that with ScentBird you can try out various high-end perfumes to find one you like. Okay, but if I wanted to find out one I like, I would do it for FREE by going to the mall.

Why in the world would I pay $14.95 a month to have you send me a high end “sample” and hope that I like it? No thanks.

Basically, any perfume you buy from ScentBird will cost you about $55.37 per fluid ounce, since they charge you $14.95 a month for a 8 ml bottle of your chosen perfume.

Moschino Fresh Couture is available online for $9.41 per fluid ounce.

Maybe that was just one bad example. I decided to check out some of their other options just to be fair. I took the top 5 best selling scents from the Scent Bird website and Googled just how much I could buy them from other online retailers.

1. The Architects Club by Arquiste $190 for 3.4 fl oz $55.88 per fluid ounce
2. Brit Sheer by Burberry $35.52 3.3 fl oz $10.76 per fluid ounce
3. Carven Le Parfume by Carven Parfumes $44.95 1.7 fl oz $26.44 per fluid ounce
4. Gold by Commodity $105 3.4 fl oz $30.88 per fluid ounce
5. Dolce by Dolce & Gabbana $35.01 1 fl oz $35.01 per fluid ounce

So it turns out you save money almost every time (but not always) by just buying the perfume you like online.

For example, Brit Sheer by Burberry, you can buy it online for $10.75 per fluid ounce or get it at Scent Bird for $55.37 per fluid ounce.

The only perfume I found actually cheaper in the top 5 best selling was The Architects Club by Arquiste which cost $190 for a 3.4 fl oz bottle which works out to be like $55.88 per fluid ounce. You only save $0.51 by buying it from scentbird. Not even a whole dollar!

So yeah, I stand by my original theory, I don’t get scent bird.  I just don’t have the money to waste on it.

 

 

More ways to make good money in the Township game

Tags

Game, Mobile App, Money, Tips, Township, Township Cash, Township Game Tips

I previously talked about making money in the Township game and today I wanted to touch back on that subject.

As I said before, the most stable way to do that was through farming wheat. It takes only 2 minutes to grow, it’s free to plant and in return, you are paid 1 gold each, and if you have the 2x booster activated, you actually make 2 gold per harvest.

I’m now level 59 and my original advice still stands.

I now have 90 plots of land to farm and that means I can make 180 gold every 2 minutes and that adds up fast.

But something I didn’t touch on before and I probably should have is the importance of the helicopter.

The theory is that every building you have should be working at all times, especially once you get the zoo because with that you can start selling the items you make in the main game in the zoo for a higher profit.

I say keep every building busy, always making sure you have at least one of every kind of item because you’ll want to start giving more attention to helicopter to maximize your profits.

If you are always working at keeping at least 1 of every item in your inventory, then you should be able to easily knock out several helicopter orders per day and you’d be surprised just how much that can make you and it also gives a ton of experience to boost your level.

You spend 100 gold coins to send your boat to get usually about 3 grapes per trip. Sure, sometimes you can get more, maybe as many as 6 a trip, but I found you almost always get at least 3. That means grapes cost you about 34 gold each to get.

You can sell them in your barn for 48 gold coins each. But right now I have an offer to buy 8 grapes for 610 gold coins, and 257 experience. That’s 76.25 gold coin per grape, by far the most money I can make for a single grape.

Don’t be afraid to trash orders that you don’t have any of the items for. What I do is go through the batch of orders and seek out orders where I specifically only need one or two things like this one seen below.

These are orders I can quickly fill. If someone is asking for a bunch of items I don’t already have, I trash it and move on.

Also while you are doing this, keep an eye on your zoo. Once you start to upgrade the buildings there, you can make some decent money from random items.

A single strawberry in my zoo right now will get me 16 gold, 5 experience, 2 hearts (which are used to get free gems).

A strawberry cost 5 gold to plant, so I more than tripled my profit from that single item. The problem is, I can only sell 5 at a time. But still, it all adds up – a little here, a little there and before long you are sitting on top of 100,000 gold coins, just enough to buy that jewelry store you’ve always wanted.

🙂

 

The perfect gift for the fashionista

Tags

Amazon, Fashionista, Gift, Lace Crop Top, Timeless Gala

I have a 17 year old niece who is a Fashionista. She’s hard to buy for because the things she normally likes cost more than a normal person can afford or they are very hard to find, especially because I don’t live in Paris, New York, Los Angeles, or Milan.

After graduating high school a semester early, I wanted to reward her with a special gift. She deserved it. But the question was, what could I get her that wouldn’t cost me an arm and a leg, but that she would still absolutely love?

And that’s when I found it. It’s a lace crop top from this website called Timeless Gala. The shirt was $30 from Amazon.

They didn’t have rush shipping for some reason, but that was fine with me because I was still able to get it in time for her early graduation party in January.

In the end, she loved the top and it was the best gift at the party. Turns out I’m not the only person in my family that struggles to buy for her. 🙂

Anyway, I didn’t mean for this post to turn into a sales pitch for some company but I did want to share this with you because if you are like me and have a hard time shopping for the little fashionista in your family, you’ll want to check out this company. They have their products in an amazon store so if you are struggling like I was to find a great, yet affordable gift, you should check them out.

 

 

FastSupport.com is a Scam!

Tags

Facebook, FastSupport.com, Hacker, Scam

One day I logged into my Facebook account to find it has been disabled. Someone had reported my identity as fake and as a result Facebook requested a copy of my ID to prove I was, me.

I sent them my driver’s license. Easy enough, right? Of course not. It’s Facebook we are talking here.

So about 24 hours later they write me back and ask me for more proof.

This time I sent them the first page of my latest bank statement, which included my name and address, a copy of my social security card and a copy of my health insurance card which included my date of birth, which had to match the name and date of birth on my account.

About 24 hours later they write me back, with the exact letter they sent me 24 hours prior, as if I hadn’t just sent them 3 more forms of ID. Forms of ID mind you that they asked for (they provide you a list of what kinds of additional ID they want from you).

So this time I sent them a copy of my vehicle insurance card from Progressive.

The next day I tried to Google out a number for Facebook. I found some web page that gave me a 1-800 number for Facebook tech support. Within a few seconds I was on the phone with someone who said they were Facebook tech support and I told them my problem.

They wanted to connect to my account and asked me to go to FastSupport.com. I did and they connected to my computer remotely.

He opened up Facebook and as it had said before, it said …

Thanks for providing your ID

Thanks for your patience as we work to verify this account. We’ll email you as soon as we’ve reviewed your ID.

The next thing he did was go to the command prompt and enter my email address. The thing of it is, you can’t access your gmail account from the dos command prompt. So next he ran the tree command, listing off every directly in my computer. It does nothing more than just display every directory on your drive.

He starts to talk about how someone from Las Vegas has access to my email and has hijacked my account.

Somehow magically when the tree command finished displaying all the directories on my computer he came up with a message telling me that very thing.

Funny thing is, I know just enough about computers to know that isn’t possible to get that sort of message. He would have had to type it in copy and paste it at the cmd line for it to display that message.

Long story short, to fix my poor hijacked computer, I would need to pay him $300. I asked him what this had to do with my Facebook account and he said we can’t fix that problem over the phone, even though previously he had said that’s why he wanted to connect to my computer, so that I didn’t need to upload my ids, he could verify it remotely.

No he can’t do that. But he can fix my “hacked computer” for only $300.

Long story short, don’t fall for the FastSupport.com scam. They are not the official support number for Facebook.

 

The Truth about Xfinity Cable

Tags

Cable, Cable TV, Comcast, Xfinity On Demand

Have you ever seen those commercials advertising Xfinity cable and how great their services are? If you are like me you probably have and that means you’ve seen them rave about how you can watch any TV show or movie you want on any device.

That sounds like a great thing, right? But just how great is it really?

Yes there is an app that you can download on your phone and pull up most episodes of any TV show for the current season that you can view on TV. If for example your cable plan doesn’t include BBC America, then you won’t be able to watch any shows from BBC America on your phone or iPad.

I missed the last few episodes of the popular Fox TV show called Lucifer so I decided to download the Xfinity app for my phone and watch one of the missed episodes.

If you were to catch it on TV, it will span 1 hour on TV but the show itself will actually only be about 52 minutes long. That means you’ll get 8 minutes of commercials. That’s usually spread out about 2 minutes long, during 4 different breaks.

You will get several of the same commercial breaks with the xfinity mobile app but even worse.

During the 52 minute long episode you will get about 6 to 10 commercial breaks during which time you’ll have to watch between 4 and 16 commercials each. Yes, you heard me right – I said 16 commercials in a row.

If that in itself wasn’t bad enough, I should point out that they aren’t different commercials, they are the same 4 or 5 commercials replayed over and over and over and over again.

Just imagine how bad it is to have to sit through the exact same United Healthcare commercial 6 times in a row.

If that wasn’t bad enough. When I went to watch the second episode of Lucifer I got about half way through. It played 4 commercials and then stopped playing. I pushed the play button and that triggered a new commercial cycle as if it didn’t realize I just sat through one. Only this time I had to sit through 16 new commercials. I finally got through it and it stopped playing again!

I finally just had to turn the app off before I threw my phone out the window.

The annoying commercials aren’t the only problem with Xfinity. They also have a horrible DVR functionality. You can only record one thing and that is the channel you are currently watching. If you change the channel while recording it will cancel the recording.

And as with all the people who tried to record the Superbowl this year learned the hard way, there is no “record show +30 minutes” feature. If a show is scheduled for say 1 to 2 pm, it will record that channel from 1 to 2 pm but that means a lot of people missed the last 5 minutes of the Superbowl – the overtime, arguably the best part of the game.

Now let’s talk about their customer service.

In addition to cable TV, I also have internet service through Xfinity. On January 11th I received a notification that I had gone over my data limit. Somehow in the previous 11 days my data usage had gone up ten times above normal.

I called tech support and they couldn’t figure it out either. They said they would escalate the ticket and get back with me within 24 hours.  Today is February 8th and I’m still waiting on them to get back with me.

Another thing I want to let you know about is their on time guarantee. They used to have a commercial, not sure if they play this one anymore but they used to advertise that you don’t have to sit around and wait for them to show up all day. They will give you an appointment or be there on time or you get a $20 credit.

In the 3 times during the last year I’ve had to have them out to my house, not a single time have they ever actually made it on time. They will make an appointment for say Monday from 2 to 5 pm. You sit around and wait and they don’t show up. They don’t call. Nothing. You have to call and file a complaint to get a new appointment and then demand the promised $20 credit.

This happened to me not once, not twice but three times now.

So next time you are thinking about getting cable TV or using Xfinity for internet service, just remember this post.

 

What’s the best way to make money in the Township game?

Tags

Bakery, Bread, Coins, Game, Gold, Mobile App, Money, Township, Township Cash, Wheat

I’ve been playing a new game, it’s the Township app for my iPhone. I did pretty good until I got to about level 30 but I also spent way to much real money buying Township Cash. That I didn’t want to do anymore but I found myself struggling, until I did the math.

So how do you earn enough money to do well in the game without spending real life money? The answer is farming wheat.

Simply put, wheat takes 2 minutes to grow. It’s free to plan and in return you are paid 1 gold coin and 1 experience point.

If you have the super harvest bonus activated, you’ll make 2 gold because you’ll harvest 2x as much.

At level 38, I have 55 farming plots available.

That means I can plant 55 wheat plots that will take 2 minutes to grow. Because I have the super harvest bonus activated, I get 110 gold every 2 minutes. This works out to be 55 gold per minute.

I could take that wheat and instead of selling it outright turn it into bread which sells for 5 coins each and gives 2 experience points each. But if you do the math, that doesn’t pay as much per minute.

So the answer is, to make the most money you can in the Township game, you need to grow wheat and sell it as fast and as often as you can.