Expense Report #19

This week was a bit different. A few years back, I expressed my indifference about shopping on tax-free weekends, but if you need to buy something big-ticketish, or you've been contemplating it, then you might as well take advantage of the savings.

Such was the case for us this time around. The Mrs. and I have been talking about replacing our mattress and foundation for some time. We bought it a few months after we got married, so it's closing in on 12 years old, and its support isn't what it used to be. This is normal, and you can flip the thing as much as you want, but eventually you just have to deal with it.

For almost as long as we've been having the replacement discussion, we have known that we wanted a foam mattress. We tried them out at Jordan's on one of our ice cream visits, and found one we really liked. It happens to be the store's brand, so it's an excellent value, and the store-brand mattresses are made in New England, so we'd sort of be helping to support a local factory too.

A while back, we also saw a rug at Jordan's that we liked for our living room. 100% wool, made in India, and again a very reasonable price. We wrote down the information and held onto it. We even got an American Express gift card from my siblings last Christmas that we've been saving to put toward it.

I recently received a bit of a windfall, and while it's not large enough to eradicate my credit card balance, it's more than enough to buy the mattress and the rug, with some left over. So when the tax-free weekend was announced, I figured we should act. Plus we'd recently received a flyer from Jordan's offering a $100 discount off a $1000 purchase. Combined with the gift card and the sales tax savings, the decision was pretty much made for us.

It took a bit of convincing for the Mrs. to see it this way, but we made our way to Jordan's yesterday. It wasn't quite as busy as I thought it would be; some of the staff we talked with said it had been busier on Saturday. But I think it took only about 45 minutes to accomplish everything, given that we had to go to two different departments. For whatever computer-system reason, the purchases could not be rung up as one transaction, but the clerks knew how to process it so that the correct discount was applied.

Bonus: mattresses include free delivery, setup, and removal of your old bedding. It'll be almost a month before the new mattress and foundation get delivered, which is to be expected when so many people are buying around the same time. (Had we gone on Saturday, we might have been able to arrange an earlier delivery.) The rug is not stocked regularly, so it will take 7 to 10 weeks to arrive (we already knew this), at which time we will go pick it up at the store. It isn't that large, so it will fit in the car easily enough.