Product Loyalty is Dead...and so it should be?

 Last Sept, I started buying a certain brand of kitty litter. Low dust, good bacteria to keep odors down, it was great. It was also more expensive than what I normally buy. I was spending well over $80 a month on kitty litter alone, even though money is tight. I want my cats to be healthy.

 Then I received an email from Amazon looking for reviews because I bought that kitty litter through them. I understand the HUGE value of a review, so I left a glowing one, but added a warning. I said that if the price went up, it'd be the first thing on my budget chopping block.

You can understand my dismay when within 24 hours of posting my review the price hiked $20. Well, that was it for me. I wasn't kidding around when I left my review.

I haven't bought that litter again.

Companies that do this don't realize that customers aren't able to stretch a dollar the way they used to, at least not without jumping through financial hoops. Now it seems like everyone is looking for a bigger cut of people's pay checks. They're not getting the message that there is no longer such a thing as customer loyalty. The majority of consumers are forced to make choices that they didn't have to a few years ago. So greedy companies who still want to meet a certain profit margin are going to price themselves out of business; but that's my humble opinion.

My money tip for today ties in with a post I made a few days ago--my healthy hamburger soup recipe. Homemade soup is cost effective (because you can get quite a few meals from it and you can freeze it), filling, and healthy. Another benefit, it saves time. If you prep the night before, you can throw a soup together in less than ten minutes and an hour later you have a wonderful, tasty meal. You can have it as a quick snack too. Day or night.

Cheap, quick, and nutritious. It doesn't get any better than that.