You can pay people to fix the things you can’t, but it’s happening less and less. Despite the recession-induced uptick in the shoe repair business, the repair business has been in a general decline for decades: As the WSJ noted, there were 7,000 shoe repair shops in the U.S. in 2009, down from 120,000 during the Great Depression. Getting things repaired used to be a common part of life, but now, aside from cars and bikes, people don’t have things fixed all that often. If you’re not in the habit of doing so, it can be hard to know where to go (repair shops are often very small, one-man or mom and pop businesses), or how much it will cost—oftentimes it feels easier to just buy a new one of whatever it is you need repaired. Lately, I’ve been trying to repair more things instead of buying new ones:

Buttonhole, $6. After a year of wearing my favorite blue button-down shirt at least once a week, the bottom buttonhole began to fray. Buttons are easy enough to sew on, but buttonholes are tricky, so I took it to a tailor for repair. I’d had him alter my suit and a couple of pairs of pants, but I wasn’t sure if it would be worth the cost to repair a buttonhole.

“Six dollars,” he said.

“Perfect!” I exclaimed, feeling great about getting my shirt fixed, instead of buying another. I felt less great when I got back to my car and found that I’d forgotten to put money in the meter, so I’d picked up a $35 parking ticket. I’m still not sure if the buttonhole repair cost $6 or $41, but I think about the repaired hole every time I put on the shirt.

Watch, $145. For some reason that seemed important at the time, I thought that it would be romantic, or cool (or both) to wear an old mechanical watch at my wedding—a nod to simpler times when watches were more complicated and less accurate. Watches these days are essentially jewelry, since everyone carries a phone, but I didn’t want to be continually checking my phone on my wedding day, and I figured I might as well try to look classy. I found a simple, elegant old automatic watch on eBay for about $50, and replaced the worn out band for another $15. It looked great, but lost about five minutes a day.

So I took it to a great little watch repair kiosk at the mall. The guy there, George, always replaces the batteries in my watches for $4. He initials and dates the batteries, and if they run out of juice in less than a year, he’ll replace them for free. But he couldn’t fix the watch, and while it was at the shop, I got married, wearing a perfectly nice watch my parents had given me years before.

Many months later, I decided that I’d get the old watch repaired. It’d be nice to have on hand for formal occasions, I thought, and maybe it would make a meaningful heirloom someday. I eventually took it to a tiny, one-man shop in a small room on the second floor of a building in Philadelphia’s diamond district. It cost $145 (cash only) to fix—much more than the price of the watch. You can even buy a few, though not many, automatic watches new for less than that. But I decided this one was worth repairing because of its age, because otherwise it would be discarded, which felt wrong, and because I’d bought it for my wedding, even if I didn’t wear it that day.

Two driver’s side mirrors, $360. On the morning of my birthday this year, I discovered that someone had smashed my driver’s side rear-view mirror, taken it clean off. I called the police, and an officer came by to take the report. He was sympathetic. He said that last summer, he’d been involved in a shooting, and he’d had to go to therapy to make sure he was dealing with it OK. While he was in one of his therapy appointments, someone smashed one of the windows of his brand new car. Pure vandalism—they didn’t even take anything. He told me that I shouldn’t bother with my insurance company, since it would cost less than the deductible to fix the mirror. He was right. I took it to my mechanic, Carlos, who put on a generic version of the mirror and mounting for about $180, installed. So it goes, I thought. Life in the city.

I was a lot less zen when it happened again a month later. To the very same mirror, the brand new one that had just been put on! This time, instead of vandalism, it was hit by a passing car. “Too bad it wasn’t the passenger side, then they’d match!” Carlos said.

Money is an everyday, universal thing (even though it’s not even a real thing at all), but spending it can feel so completely different depending on the circumstances, even when it’s all for the same purpose: repairs. I was just paying people to fix things that I couldn’t, but I felt proud to spend $6 on my buttonhole, stupid to waste $35 on a parking ticket, sentimental to drop $145 to fix an old watch, bummed but relatively stoic about the first $180 for the mirror, seriously pissed about the second $180.

When you repair something you own, those feelings become part of the object itself, since it wasn’t replaced with a new, un-imbued version. Repairing makes the world of everyday objects a bit richer. Putting on that blue shirt reminds me to feed the meter, and more generally to mind the little things. Getting into my car makes me wonder if I should move out of Philadelphia. Each of these objects connects me to a series of minor memories that otherwise might have drifted away if not anchored in the material world. For me, that’s reason enough to keep taking my broken things to small shops in the hope they can be restored.

Previously: Why You Should Shop at Ethnic Grocery Stores

Stefan Zajic lives in Philadelphia and thinks about science all day. Photos by Stefan.

I’m here to convince you to shop at your local ethnic grocery stores.

I live in Philadelphia. The map above of where people of different ethnicities live in Philadelphia has red dots for whites, blue dots for blacks, and yellow dots for Hispanics. In the middle of the map, there’s a place in North Philadelphia where the north-south swath of Hispanic neighborhoods tapers down to a point and mixes with the black and white neighborhoods to the west and east. And right there, there’s a locally-owned grocery store called Cousin’s. Not surprisingly, it’s a fantastic place to shop for food.

It’s made even better by the fact that there’s a fairly strong Muslim community in North Philadelphia. So: Take a full service American supermarket, add two big aisles of Mexican/Spanish produce, meats and groceries (including all manner of hot peppers, salsas, queso fresco, chorizos, octopus, salt cod, all of those different kinds of beans and cornmeal, etc.), and then add a halal meat counter, Lebanese yogurt, and a whole aisle of Middle Eastern specialties (halva, tahini, sardines in spicy oil, etc.). It’s a dream to shop there. The prices are rock bottom, the selection is amazing, and the food quality is equal to or higher than any other major, regular-priced supermarket I’ve tried.

It’s become my favorite place to grocery shop, but I’ve had a tough time convincing any of my friends to give it a shot.

There are tremendous benefits to shopping at your local ethnic grocery store, even if only occasionally. You’ll definitely save money. A lot of money! The difference is really dramatic. At Cousin’s, most everything feels like it’s priced at 20 to 50 percent less than mass-market competitors. Five pounds of fresh chicken legs for $3; 18 large eggs for $2; a pound of unsalted butter for $2. And the prices are similarly low at my local Chinese market, where I sometimes shop for greens, pork, fish and Asian goods like sushi rice and coconut milk. Make no mistake: Shopping at an ethnic grocery will make a big difference in your monthly budget, enough so that it’s worth trying just for the savings.

You’ll also discover new foods, and new combinations of foods (the combination of Sriracha sauce with, well, just about everything is a good example). Those foods will typically be high quality and not over-processed (so, generally healthier!), because that’s what immigrant populations demand and expect. As economist Tyler Cowen noted in his article on shopping exclusively at his local Chinese grocery for a month:

When it comes to ethnic markets, most of the shoppers are well informed. They come from cultures where food preparation receives more attention than in the United States. They’re also largely immigrants or children of immigrants. Either they hail from cultures where most food prices are lower than they are here or the immigrants have lower incomes themselves, or both.

You’ll get outside of your usual loop and meet different people. And you’ll actually be shopping locally, with the money staying in your neighborhood or city, which probably isn’t the case with Trader Joe’s, headquartered in California (and owned by Germans), or Whole Foods, based in Texas.

So, why don’t people like me and my friends usually shop at ethnic groceries? The reasons I often hear are crime, selection, presentation and feeling like an outsider, whether due to language or ethnicity.

Crime? Well, if people are getting carjacked in the parking lot of your local ethnic grocery, don’t go there. But typically, grocery stores are built in fairly stable neighborhoods near large residential populations. I was surprised to find that there’s actually the same amount or maybe even more crime in my mostly white neighborhood as there is near Cousin’s. If this is a real concern for you, just go on the Internet and look up the statistics—you might be surprised.

In terms of selection, well, it’s true—your local ethnic grocery won’t have everything you’re used to, and that’s part of the point. As Cowen points outs:

The Safeway or Wegmans or corner market supplies a lot of convenient food… but that very convenience can make the local supermarket a rut. The deadening hand of routine takes over our shopping lives: We know what we want, where to find it, when to get it, and what to do with it. These habits can be the biggest obstacles to discovering new regions of the food universe.

The foods you miss from your American supermarket probably weren’t that good for you anyway, and being exposed to the new options at your ethnic grocery is bound to enhance your cooking and dining.

Presentation is one of the key differences between American and ethnic groceries. The wide aisles, gentle Muzak and carefully crafted shopping experiences at conventional supermarkets may make you feel comfortable, but you’re paying for it in the higher costs of your food, and in many cases those store design elements are pushing you towards more expensive, less healthy foods. At the very least, keeping you comfortable may well be keeping you in your routine, so you’ll keep shopping wherever you’re shopping. As with selection, breaking out of your rut and shopping in a place where it’s not immediately clear where to find your favorite foods can have great benefits on the variety of foods you cook and eat.

Addressing people’s discomfort at being in store where the main language isn’t English, or where almost everyone is of a different ethnicity, is complicated. But let me just say: Try not to let your comfort zones get in the way of your dinner, or the health of your pocketbook. Race relations in America are obviously complex, but being willing to stand in line at the supermarket with people who don’t look like you is a good start for everyone involved. And you can be sure that the owners of the supermarkets are glad to have more people shopping in their stores. Back when “urban food deserts” were a hot topic, a local TV station showed up at Cousin’s when I was shopping there to see just what scarce morsels of food might be found in the barren expanses of North Philadelphia. The store managers, who are of Middle Eastern descent, were dashing around the store in front of the cameras waving pineapples, fresh-baked pita, poblano peppers and giant avocados.

There are such great benefits to shopping at ethnic groceries, and the downsides almost entirely evaporate upon closer inspection. I’m not suggesting that you follow Tyler Cowen and shop exclusively at an ethnic grocery—just try to incorporate it into your routine occasionally. After all, for almost anyone who’s interested in both good food and not spending too much on groceries, it’s impossible to get everything you need at one store. Shopping at an ethnic grocery once a week, or even once a month, is bound to benefit your wallet, your taste buds, and maybe even your city and the people who live in it.

Stefan Zajic lives in Philadelphia and thinks about science all day. Map Credit: Eric Fischer

We’re taking Monday and Tuesday off for the Christmas holiday next week, and are kicking off our year-end series about things we learned about ourselves and money in 2012, mistakes we made, advice given and received, our favorite things we bought (or regretted), and more. These pieces will be running until the New Year. Thank you so much for reading, commenting, and supporting our site in our first year. We can’t tell you how much we appreciate it. — Mike & Logan.

Here’s Stefan.

If you buy good things and use them for a long time, it can help you save money for more nice things in the future.

It’s a lesson that one learns again and again in life, but this year I really noticed it with clothes. I got married, and so I went shopping for a suit, a pair of shoes, and a couple of other things. At some point during that process, I realized, terrifyingly, that none of my current dress clothes fit, and that I’d bought most of my clothes on sale, so many of them were a little weird or gimmicky, and not particularly flattering. So I started looking around and doing a little research.

Now when I say “buy good things,” please don’t think I mean “buy expensive things.” I still want, like most people, to get a good deal. For jeans, I’m still not convinced you can really find better value than a pair of Levi 501s for $40. But I was surprised to find that there are wonderful, high quality oxford cloth button down shirts made in Philadelphia, where I live. Regular price is $88, but they go on sale constantly, and I’ve paid $40-60 for mine. I can tell already that they’ll hold up for years and soften pleasantly with age. I was also surprised to learn that you can get beautiful, classically made men’s dress shoes for around $150. Nice stitching, leather soles and all. They’re from India and China, but the quality is pretty good. They cost more than the rubber-soled equivalents at the mall, but they’ll not only last a long time, they’ll actually get better with age.

I used to only shop for clothes in the clearance sections of stores. It’s still worth keeping an eye out for great deals, but a lot of the stuff that’s on sale is marked down for a reason: it’s trendy, ill-fitting or otherwise just not very good. Saving up for clothes that cost a little more, but will look and feel great for years—that’s something I learned this year.

Stefan Zajic lives in Philadelphia and thinks about science all day. Photo: Hello Turkey Toe

• Puff Daddy, “It’s All About the Washingtons”
• The Notorious B.I.G., “Less Money, Mo’ Problems”
• Ice Cube, “Today Was A Bad Day, I Couldn’t Find A Job”
• Snoop Dogg, “Gin and Juice Drink”
• Jay-Z, “99 Problems (And My Mortgage Is One)”
• Dr. Dre, “Let Me Carpool”
• Kanye West, “Silver Digger”
• Beyonce, “Ladies Postponing Marriage Due to Crushing Student Loan Debt”

Stefan Zajic lives in Philadelphia, and thinks about science all day. Photo: oouinouin

This comic was my first encounter with the stock market, and I still think of this strip whenever I hear ominous news from Wall Street. It doesn’t sound like much today, but back in 1971, when the strip was published, the Dow was at about 900, so a 65 point drop would’ve been roughly 7 percent, on par with the 600-point plunges in recent years.

Collections of comic strips were always around the house during my childhood. In elementary and middle school, I stuck to Calvin and Hobbes, but sometime in high school, I started pulling my dad’s Doonesbury anthologies off the bookshelf, and reading them at the breakfast table, or on the sofa after school. 

Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury started as a college newspaper strip at Yale in 1970, and the early comics are easy to understand and enjoy: Mike getting rejected by girls. B.D. getting roughed up in football games. Everybody getting stoned. They were the happy misadventures of kids trying to find their way in the world. Things got more complicated as the 1970s progressed and Trudeau got political. Reading the strips in the mid-1990s, I’d ask my dad about the things I hadn’t heard of, or didn’t understand, which were essentially all of the cultural and historical references, broad topics like Vietnam, the politicians of the time (mainly, Nixon and his cadre), the Black Panthers, psychedelic drugs, campus protests, and the AMC Gremlin.

The comic about the Dow is from June, 1971, the early days of the strip. It’s not particularly political or very complicated. Mark has come home from college for the summer, and Mark’s dad got him a job at his stock brokerage. It’s a terrible fit, of course, since Mark is a fight-the-power campus rabble rouser. But he puts on a tie and goes into the office to humor his dad and get a look at how the other half lives. The relationship between Mark and his dad is one of my favorites in Doonesbury. They couldn’t be more different and their arguments often escalate to hilarity (for example, when Mark’s dad presents him with a bill for his childhood expenses), but at times they also genuinely try to bridge the generation gap and understand each other, or at least agree to disagree.

But this strip isn’t that. On its face, it’s just a gotcha gag: “The sky’s falling! Nah, fooled ya.”

When I got my first job after grad school, in late 2006, I tried to educate myself about investing, because with that job came a 401(k). I needed to figure out what to do with it, if anything. I hadn’t thought at all about investing before, because I’d never had a real job or any extra money. After weighing the options, I decided that I would invest broadly. The recommendation for young workers over the long-term: mostly stocks, the rest bonds, and then swap gradually as you reach the retirement age. The money started coming out of my paychecks and into my 401(k), and I mostly didn’t notice.

I didn’t think much about investing again until 2008, when the markets started plummeting. I wasn’t too worried. I figured that, at worst, I’d bought too high for a couple of years, but if I kept my job and kept buying, I’d come out fine in the end. I also knew that since my investments were for retirement, they had decades to bounce back and grow.

But it was still breathtaking. My account lost roughly half its value—many thousands of dollars, in a couple of months. How could all of that money have been there one month, but gone the next? Where did it go?

People tend to think of, and talk about, having money in their retirement accounts. They talk about “pulling cash out of the 401(k)” or “making money on a good stock pick.” Our casual language for these things is really sloppy. There isn’t any money in your retirement account, of course. There are shares. But that’s a little abstract, especially in the era of electronic finances, so I prefer: pieces of paper in a vault. That’s what investments used to be, literally: stock certificates and bonds, printed on paper, often kept at the bank or in a safety deposit box. And that’s still, in essence, what your 401(k) is, or at least, that’s exactly how it behaves. It’s a stack of paper in a vault. Each month, you buy a few more pieces of paper and add them to the stack. The idea is to accumulate enough pieces of paper so that, when you’re older, you can sell them to other people and live off the proceeds during your golden years.

That’s probably beyond obvious to people who work in finance, but it doesn’t get pointed out very often, perhaps because it’s not very exciting. When the market plunges, what happens to your shares? Nothing. They’re still there, in the vault, untouched. Far away from the shouting in the trading pits and the financial news shows, in perfect steel silence, sits your stack of paper.

Of course, I understand: When the market falls, the price that those pieces of paper are selling for today drops precipitously. But unless you’re planning on selling them any time soon, it hardly matters. You’re going to sell them decades in the future, and the prices at which you’ll sell them have almost nothing to do with whatever current mania is sweeping the markets.

When you check your 401(k) balance, the bold number everyone looks at first is the value of your account. I wish, instead, that the bold number was the number of shares, the number of pieces of paper. It’s a better way of thinking about what you actually own, and it’s always headed up. I also like this way of thinking about investments because it forces you to come face to face with the strangeness of the whole venture—that you really are planning your future around these nonexistent pieces of paper.

When I was in high school, first reading that Doonesbury comic, my dad was clearly Mark and Mark’s dad was his dad, my grandfather. My dad was—probably the best word for it was, and is—anti-establishment, and that included a willful disinterest in anything financial. When he went to work a corporate job to support his family, he borrowed Mark’s approach: He put on a slightly zany tie and headed into the office, but his unconventional views (and facial hair) remained. My grandfather, meanwhile, spent the 1980s losing money he’d made working for Chrysler in the 1950s and 60s in the stock market and in southern California real estate.

Today, I’m not sure which character I’m playing. I work for a large corporation, one of the heavyweights that makes up the Dow Jones Industrial Average, in fact. I’m a little bit like Mark, laughing off plunges in the Dow and trying to keep my cool in the corporate world, and I’m a little bit like Mark’s dad, trying to play it straight. But in my version, when I play Mark’s dad, it’s my parents, not my (non-existent) kid that I’m trying to guide. I find myself talking my parents back from the ledge, (hopefully) convincing them not to liquidate their retirement savings in overreaction to daily market swings. I try to explain to them, in hastily typed emails, that when the Dow falls 600 points it might not actually be the best day to pull money out of the 401(k) to renovate the basement. It’s tough, trying to give your parents advice, financial or otherwise.  It doesn’t feel quite right.

I think that’s why this comic sticks with me, and why I think of it whenever I hear about the latest market swing: The joke is simple, and not even all that funny, but the role reversal is powerful. We see the parent turned into the frightened child, and the child as the invincible adult, floating above it all—the way we all once thought of our parents, when we were kids.

Stefan Zajic lives in Philadelphia and thinks about science all day.