Saving Gas on the Internet
You can drive around forever trying to find one of these.
Photo: Homewindowrepair.com
The biggest gas saver I know is not properly inflated tires, cruise control, or a light foot on the throttle (though they all help). It's Google.
Yesterday, I finally decided to fix the casement window in the kitchen that no longer cranks open because the operating gears are stripped. Off I went to Home Depot. The last real, nearby, high-quality hardware store closed two years ago, unable to compete with the Chinese crap and third-rate materials sold by the big-box stores, so it was a 20-mile round-trip to Home Cheapo.
They had the cranks and a few other parts, "but we don't stock that mechanism because there are so many different ones," they told me. "Get the number off it and come back, we'll order it."
Well hell, I can do that.
Darned if I knew what it meant, but I Googled what I read on the window-opening arm: "EntryGard Truth." Bang! First return, "Truth EntryGard Window Hardware," at, wouldn't you know it, homewindowrepair.com. Filled the shopping cart with one $24 right-hand dual-arm operator, and when UPS delivers it in a week, I'll be back in business.
Several months ago, the TV in the living room went t/u. First Googled "lcd versus plasma tv" and got dozens of tutorials. LCD seemed to be the economical and practical choice. Then to epinions.com to see which 37-inch set individual buyers liked. Overwhelmingly, Syntax Olevia, which Target sells, according to the epinions site. But Target is a 25-mile round-trip. Beach Camera, considerably more distant, in New Jersey, also carries Olevias but in fact was just a few keyboard clicks away.
Needed a new alternator for my elderly racetrack car last month. The nearest Porsche dealer is a 90-mile drive there and back. Pelican Parts, in California, is 2,500 miles away, but they stock the alternator I needed and they're as near as the UPS truck, ultimately. Done deal. (Yes, it still takes diesel fuel to deliver those Internet-shopped items, but UPS delivers many hundreds of parcels for every truck's 150-mile circuit.)
Decided to replace our kitchen faucets awhile ago, when we installed new countertops. The choice: drive to Lowe's to look at their lousy selection--marginally better quality than Home Despot but an even longer trip--or Google "kitchen faucets" and find every faucet on the planet from plain to gold-plated at the first hit, faucets.com.
The list goes on. A special electric razor for my beard. A GPS unit for our daughter's birthday. An unusual scale-model airplane (my wintertime hobby) from the UK, another shipped within days from Tokyo. A made-to-order HDTV cable for the bedroom. EMT boots for my EMS-volunteer work. A horrifyingly expensive standby bulb for the TV projector. A new soapstone woodstove to replace our dirty, 30-year-old Vermont Castings classic. Color-printer ink from a Web site that sells inexpensive refill kits for existing cartridges. All of them Internet buys, and the list goes on.
Who needs brick-and-mortar when you can click-and-order? Waste of gas.
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