I’ve heard from a lot of people that they think this year’s cold and flu season is the worst in a long while. People seem to be getting sick all over the place, and many are looking for a quick fix that can get them back healthy as soon as possible.

One of the most popular products for alleviating symptoms of cold and flu is Airborne, an effervescent product invented by a grade school teacher. Lots of my friends (and some other Shoeboxers) swear by it, and start taking it right when they start getting sick, as per the directions.

Well, as we all know, the cold and flu are tough beasts to handle, and some question the effectiveness of Airborne. A few of these people filed a class-action law suit against the company. Airborne agreed to pay $23.3 million to settle the case.

So why am I talking about this on the Shoeblog? Well, as it turns out, Airborne is offering refunds for any Airborne that customers have ever bought… if you have a receipt. Shoeboxed users rejoice! All those receipts you’ve been saving may come in handy! This is just a friendly reminder of the usefulness that comes with having all your receipts at your fingertips. So remember to scan and save your receipts just in case you need them for refunds, returns, or exchanges. You never know when they are going to come in handy.

My dad is famous in our family for being able to return anything to a store, no matter whether he has a receipt or not, whether the product was used or not, and with total disregard for company return policies. We’re not really sure how he manages to do it. For the rest of us who aren’t lawyers by training, returning something without the receipt can be a huge annoyance. There’s really no reason that companies should require receipts for returns anymore. Come on, people. We’re living in the 21st Century; there has to be a better way to prove that you bought something.

Just to prove what we already know, here is part of Best Buy’s return policy:

Your original receipt is required for all returns, exchanges, price matches and warranty repair services.

But Best Buy, one of the most popular technology retailers in the country, probably has pretty sophisticated sales tracking systems, right? Their cash registers are actually pretty powerful computers, and they’re connected to the Internet. Wikipedia explains the industry standard for cash registers these days:

Today, these machines… record the transaction in detail including each item purchased, record the method of payment, keep totals for each product or type of product sold as well as total sales for specified periods, and do other tasks as well.

Currently, many cash registers… may be accessed remotely for the purpose of obtaining records or troubleshooting.

So if Best Buy is tracking your purchase, the price and the method of payment, why shouldn’t you have the option of returning something just with your driver’s license and credit/debit card. If I go up the register and say, “Hi, my name is Dan Englander and I bought some Boss headphones last week. In fact, here they are in their original packaging. Anyway, I’d like to return them,” then I should be able to return them! I am logged in their system! The paper receipt is totally unnecessary.

At Shoeboxed we are revolutionizing the way you organize your receipts, but it’s part of a bigger consumer revolution. We want you to have more control over retailers and be able to make the shopping experience more about YOU. Updates to come.

Filling out expense reports can be a costly hassle. Business travelers have to track and convert expenses to get reimbursed. There are many methods of dealing with the annoyance we all call expense reports: costly executive assistants, time-consuming Excel expense log-sheets, expensive scanners, and, of course, Shoeboxed Receipt Mail-In. But only one of these options is both cheap and easy.

For a year, Shoeboxed will scan your receipts for $19.95/month, leaving you with basically no work to do. To see how much you’ll save, Shoeboxed provides a Receipt Mail-In savings calculator. It lets you value your time per hour, specify how many receipts you get per month, and how much you might spend on a receipt scanner. It calculates how much time and money you save with Shoeboxed Receipt Mail-In.

One great thing about Mail-In is that it’s so simple. Put receipts in the envelope, seal, and send. You will have easy-to-use access to all of your expenditures in your Shoeboxed account. When expense report time comes around, you will be prepared to deal with it!

Who said expense reports couldn’t be cheap and easy?

Sign up today to get started!

Deals, deals, deals. As of yesterday, they are officially all over the place. And they’ll be everywhere throughout the holiday season shopping rush. Whether you go out with the family to your local mall and spend the entire day there, or if you decide to stay at home and take advantage of the many online store deals, it’s a pretty fun time of year.

Use your Shoeboxed email address to buy online and scan or upload images of the paper receipts you get in stores this season. Not only will all your receipts be quickly organized, but you will also be able to share your newest acquisitions with other shoppers looking for inspiration.

Here are a few tips for a great holiday shopping season:

1. Check online deals. People too often overlook the deals made available by online stores and just head off to the mall. Be sure to go online and search for items you are interested in buying. You may find some very attractive deals.

2. If you go out to shop, check store opening times and try to go as early as possible to be sure that you will get the items you want at the price they were advertised for. The great deals usually run out quickly on Black Friday, but it’s also true for the rest of the holiday season at many stores.

3. Check the newspaper! Some great deals are revealed only in the newspaper, can be missed if you’re not looking.

4. Solicit the help of friends! Getting a recommendation from another shopper is invaluable. Sift through all the ads, and actually get want you want this shopping season.

5. Check out our favorite stores here to get a glimpse into the wackiest, most useful, and most entertaining stores on the web.

This week is one of the most exciting times of the year for shopping. Unfortunately, it can also be a very disorganized and frantic time. Make sure you shop online with your Shoeboxed email address and organize all your receipts on your free Shoeboxed account!

We have a lot of new features on Shoeboxed as of last Friday, but there’s only one that gives you free stuff.

After you’re done exploring how our receipt organization is improved, and how you can organize, share, and stereotype specific things you and other people have bought to get those receipts, and then after you’re done recovering from how awesome our makeover is, there’s something else you should check out…

And when you use this feature, we’ll send you a free Shoeboxed t-shirt. Yes!

This fall’s hottest fashion is available to you with a couple clicks of the mouse. Once you login, there’s a link in the top right of your overview page. Click it, and it’s super easy to invite all of your e-mail contacts. We’re compatible with Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo! and several other popular e-mail clients. We want everyone you know to know about Shoeboxed too, and this is a great way to get the word out. If you use the site, if you love the team, hell, even if you’re kind of bored, the invite feature is for you!

When you send an e-mail to all your contacts, send an e-mail to sophia@team.shoeboxed.com with your mailing address and we’ll send you a crisp, new Shoeboxed t-shirt.

I wear mine every day.

On Wednesday, Apple announced that it will reduce the price of its much-hyped iPhone from $599 to $399 for its 8GB model. The new price is still a little out of my budget, so I don’t have one yet. It was completely different story, though, for those people that had bought them before the reduction. They were a little angry.

Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, apparently got hundreds of personal e-mails from furious costumers about the price reduction. Imagine buying a full-priced iPhone on Tuesday, only to wake up to the news of the price reduction. Ouch.

In response to the outrage, Jobs, in a great PR move, posted a letter on the Apple website. In the letter, he explained that he thought his decision to reduce the price was the right move, but compromised with iPhone buyers by offering them a $100 credit that can be used toward the purchase of other Apple products.

Some people think this is brilliant, some people are just steaming mad. Over here at Shoeboxed, I’m just thinking, “I hope they have their receipts.” The only thing worse than paying $200 more than everybody else for your cell phone is losing out on the $100 of free Apple stuff too because you can’t prove that you actually bought the iPhone.

If any of these early iPhone adopters was using Shoeboxed, though, it couldn’t be easier for them to walk into the Apple store, show them their receipt and cash in on that store credit. Apple offers e-mail receipts for any purchase, no matter if it was purchased online or in one of their brick-and-mortar stores. If you bought an iPhone and had the receipt sent to Shoeboxed, you are in the clear. And if you chose to opt-out of the e-mail receipt option at Apple, you could have scanned your receipt into your Shoeboxed account, and saved it.

You never know when your receipts are going to come in handy. Who knows, that crumpled one in your wallet might be worth $100 one day…

Edit: fixed links 9-10-07 - MTR

When I first registered for my Shoeboxed account, I wanted to fill up my account with all my purchasing information. But alas, I am a poor college student, and couldn’t afford to go on a shopping spree right then and there just to watch the receipts go in (though I did make one or two impulse buys anyway…). So I went through my personal inbox, and dug out all my old receipts. It was a pain, but I realized that it was the last time I would ever have to sift through thousands of e-mails to find the few important receipts.

I forwarded all these e-mail receipts to my @shoeboxed.com account, and they show up just as they would have if the store had sent it directly there. Shoeboxed doesn’t care that I forwarded it, the plane ticket I bought six months ago still says it’s from Travelocity. Sweet!

Once I had all my old receipts in there, I was shocked at how much I had spent online in the past two years. Old purchases I had completely forgotten about really reminded me of how much I consistently overlook my budget. I don’t consider myself an avid online shopper, but the expenses were really racking up!

There’s just no better way to get an comprehensive snapshot of your spending than to see everything you’ve bought, all listed in one place. It’s so simple, and it’s the core functionality of Shoeboxed. If you haven’t tried it yet, you’re missing out!

When it comes to online shopping, I’ve realized that my mom isn’t really seeing the whole picture. Sure, she’s learned to order her running shoes online so that she can save money. We’ve set up online banking so that she can easily pay all of the bills electronically, saving paper and minimizing piles on the kitchen counter. She even knows that there’s a way to download music with something called “iTunes” that somehow can get on your “iPod”. Yes, she uses air quotes.

But I don’t think she realizes all of the ways that the internet can improve her day-to-day life. If she needs to find research for a paper she’s writing on childhood development, even the local librarian is going to recommend Google Scholar as a starting point. If she needs a detailed map from St. Louis to Durham, it’s always faster to use Mapquest or Google Maps. If she misses the finale of her favorite show, she should know that they are often available for free on the network’s website.

So it’s time I step in. I can’t say that I understand what moms out there want. And I certainly don’t claim to understand how my mom thinks — AT ALL. But I don’t think that’s necessarily the point. No one has ever taken the time to tell my mom what she should know about the internet — how it can make her life easier. The more time I spend working at Shoeboxed, the more I feel compelled to help my mom see what she’s missing.

So if you want to use the internet—if you want to know how it can make your life easier, here are a few sites that you might want to check out:

Amazingmail.com. Let’s start with the basics. Who doesn’t like to show off the cool places they have visited? Now you can do it easily and cheaply. Upload your digital photos to the computer (the camera should come with instructions…) and make a postcard that you can send to friends. It’s a great alternative to the yearly Christmas card, and the product always looks great. Then check out Ofoto.com where you can print your favorites.

Keycode.com and HotCoupons.com. You might want to sit down for this one. There are online sites that specialize in coupons! Many of the sites offer deals for specific retailers that can’t be found in the weekend newspaper. And don’t think that you can’t find local deals—you can enter your city’s name and “local coupons” into Google and find printable bar codes for your favorite shops.

Iexplore.com. You know something’s good when it’s affiliated with National Geographic. If you want to go on an exciting vacation but don’t have any time to plan it, you should check out this site. It has travel and activity guides for every inch of the globe, with advice on how to get the most out of your vacation. Whether you’re looking to climb a mountain or go sailing, Iexplore can make the appropriate recommendation (based on your experience and the trip’s level of difficulty). It will even recommend pre-screened travel and gear packages.

Rottentomatoes.com. When you’re in the mood for a romantic comedy, do you really trust the opinion of Roger Ebert, Richard Roepert, or Gene Shallot? Of course not. This is a democracy, people—when I’m choosing a movie, I want to hear the opinion of all the qualified critics and film gurus. Next time you’re heading to the cinema, check out rottentomatoes.com. The “Tomatometer” is the most trusted scale when it comes to finding the freshest movie. On a scale from one to ten, anything over a seven is a safe bet.

(more…)

Before you throw out that half-eaten pizza, you might think about attaching a bow to the box. Many dedicated “freegans” loot our dumpsters for left-over food in a frenzy from the latest anti-capitalist trend gripping the nation. And yes, there is a good chance that your half eaten pizza is a target.

That’s right, freegans is derived from a rebellious combination of “free” and “veganism”. As described on freegan.info, freeganism is:

“a total boycott of an economic system… where massively complex systems of productions ensure that all the products we buy will have detrimental impacts most of which we may never even consider.”

To be honest, I don’t exactly know what that means. What I do know is that the lifestyle includes frequent dumpster diving, gardening, shoplifting, and barter as alternatives to paying for food.
Don’t believe me? You might want to take a trip to your local Blockbuster and check out Bin Appetit. Yes, that’s an actual movie. Don’t believe me? Okay, that has to stop here.

So many questions are finally answered. What happens when you will do anything to save money? What happens when you will do anything to rebel against society, or even more likely, your parents? What happens when you will sacrifice your dignity for the greater good?

Hmm… looks like Freeganism isn’t for me. But regardless of my initial inclinations, for those of you who have the willpower to freeganize the world, good luck! For the rest of us, let’s all just keep our leftovers a little more presentable… for one man’s trash is another man’s treasure!