Mighty Bargain Hunter

How to get more rides at Disney for less?

May 16, 2013 by John Wedding 3 Comments

Amusement parks can be a great vacation, especially if you like rides that test your ability to hold your lunch.

The more popular amusement parks, like the Disney family of parks, are busy much of the year. And busy can mean long wait times on the rides.

Since time is far more valuable than money, it would make sense that there would be a way to buy less time in line for those who value their time with their family highly enough. And indeed there is: the Disney VIP Tour Services. For between $300 and $400 per hour, a Disney VIP Tour Guide will give your family five-star treatment, which includes “[t]he ability to experience some of your favorite attractions efficiently, even repeatedly.”

Translation: With a Disney VIP Tour Guide, you and your kids will wait less to get onto the rides.

However, some people have found a cheaper way to cut in line, without strong-arming everyone in their path. Some very enterprising people apparently hire their own tour guides for less than half the price, and get some of the same line-cutting benefit as if they had hired a Disney VIP Tour Guide.

These tour guides are bound to a motorized scooter. Because of the nature of their disability, they and up to five members of their party can enter through an auxiliary entrance. From the linked Disneyland Park Guide for Guests with Disabilities:

Auxiliary Entrance Limitations Some attractions have auxiliary entrances for Guests with mobility disabilities or with service animals. These entrances are not intended to bypass waiting lines. Guests with disabilities and up to five members of their party may enter through these entrances. The rest of the party should use the standard queue.

The company that once arranged the tours in question has stopped offering them for the time being. One article from the New York Post’s web site is not complimentary of this practice at all. (Perhaps some of the “inaccurate press” that Dream Tours Florida alleges can be seen in the second paragraph of the NY Post article; the Post alleges that the tour guides “pose[d] as family members” when it’s clear from the Disney text above that they didn’t need to.)

Perhaps the issue is the sentence from the Disneyland Park Guide: “These entrances are not intended to bypass waiting lines.” Indeed they aren’t; their primary purpose is to make it easier for people with disabilities to enter the rides. That these entrances almost always have very few people on them is just a fortunate coincidence. Anyone offering tours can state the rules from the brochure, and promise nothing else, thereby deflecting the notion that they intended to bypass the waiting lines. “They didn’t promise shorter wait times, but, well, it just worked out really well for us anyway.”

At present, this appears to be a loophole which regularly results in shorter wait times. Tour guides do not have to lie that they are family members. It is legal to hire pretty much whoever you want as a tour guide. It’s certainly illegal to say that you cannot hire a disabled tour guide. And $130/hour — or even half of that — isn’t chump change for anybody, so it’s hard to justify even that the disabled tour guides are being exploited.

People with money can buy luxury. Smart people with money can buy luxury for less. I don’t see anything wrong with people spending money pretty much how they choose for what they want, and if they’ve found a way to do it for less, good on them. They’re still paying far more than someone with a standard park pass, who instead pays with more time spent in line. That seems like a fair trade to me, but some people don’t like this, can’t have this, and will work to make sure that no one will have it. This is envy, and there’s no satisfying it until the luxury is eliminated.

UPDATE: Disney is already looking into this matter, and is promising action that will end the practice. Looks like it will be back to paying for a Disney VIP Tour Guide for the shorter lines.

Filed Under: Bargains

Price-check guarantees are a great bargain … for businesses?

April 27, 2013 by John Wedding 4 Comments

I was chatting with a coworker a few days ago, and the topic of price-check guarantees came up.

A price-check guarantee at a grocery store says something like this: “If an item rings up for more than the price on the shelf, we’ll knock $3 off of the lower price. If the item is less than $3, you get it free.”

I’ve caught errors like this before, and I’ve been more than happy to get the mis-priced items for next to nothing. My line of reasoning was that this was a whip to keep their prices accurate, and to provide a good customer experience if they didn’t. (Not all stores do even this. Some don’t bother to fix errors, even when they’re called on them.)

But my coworker had a different take. He argued that the store was the one who got the bargain.

His take on it was this: “Customers: Hunt for errors in our pricing. If you find something, we’ll throw a little bonus at you. If not, well sorry but you wasted your time and mental energy. In either case, we don’t have to pay employment tax or benefits for your efforts because you’re not our employee. And you’re maintaining our price database either way.”

The store owners wouldn’t say this to their customers in quite this way, of course,, but perhaps there’s a shred of truth somewhere in there?

Asking customers to take their time to do something for free (or almost free) has almost no downside business-wise if it’s done tactfully. Consider links to surveys that come printed out on receipts from grocery stores or restaurants. You might have a small chance at winning a $1,000 gift card, but likely you won’t win, and they get your feedback anyway.

The bottom line is that anything offered by a business to its customers likely is done with the intention of making a lot more from them on the backend.

Filed Under: Bargains, Shopping

Extremely low-tech greywater toilet flushing system

March 31, 2013 by John Wedding 4 Comments

Utilities make up a dependable expense in a family’s budget. Along with grocery expenses, it’s also a place that usually has a bit of slop that can be removed if things get tight.

And if cleanliness is next to godliness, certainly we all take regular showers or baths. The extent to which we do this directly affects our utility bills.

A typical shower or bath consumes on the order of 30 to 40 gallons of water. It’s easy to estimate this:

Start filling the tub. Note the time.
Grab a pitcher — we used a gallon pitcher — and measure how long it takes to fill the picther. Ours took 20 seconds to fill. This is three gallons per minute (one gallon divided by one-third of a minute).
When the tub is done filling for your bath, turn the water off and note the time. It took us 12 minutes to fill the tub to the proper level.
Running the faucet at three gallons per minute for 12 minutes puts out a total of 36 gallons. Done.

You can figure out the amount of water used in a shower the same way.

This water goes down the drain. Now, of course, it’s greywater (household wastewater), so it has more limited use.

But it’s not useless. If you can tolerate keeping the tub full after taking a bath or shower, this greywater in most cases can be re-used to flush toilets. All you need is a couple of pitchers.

Anatomy of a flushA standard toilet flush has two stages when you push the plunger. The first stage dumps about a gallon of water into the bowl quickly (within a few seconds). The pressure head caused by the raised water level starts a siphoning action that empties the bowl. The second stage that follows is a slow-fill stage that simultaneously refills the tank and bowl.

Flushing the toilet with greywater from the bathtub, then, involves repeating these steps:

Pour about a gallon of water into the bowl quickly. If you can get by with less, great. This will flush the bowl and leave the water level low in the bowl.
Pour one to two quarts of water slowly into the bowl to refill the bowl.

Note: Don’t fill the toilet holding tank with the greywater. This can be hard on the flushing mechanisms, and might back-siphon into the fresh water supply if the water pressure drops. Pour the water directly into the bowl. (It will take the same path that all greywater would go.)

This might fall into the “more trouble than it’s worth” category, but we’ve already re-used a tub’s worth of water by doing this. We personally haven’t seen any ill effects with the tub water hanging around for a few days, but one to two tablespoons of chlorine bleach per gallon would knock most of the nasties out of the water. It’s an individual judgment of risk and trouble vs. reward. Even a few gallons saved is better than nothing.

If this is indeed more trouble than it’s worth, then what about just capturing the water coming from the shower head as it’s heating up? I get a gallon of water right there, and it’s clean water, not greywater.

Anyone have more elaborate greywater systems (especially installed ones)?