Strollerderby : Amazon.com

Baby Penis Album only five bucks

Brett Singer — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Thanks to Mike's brilliant post linking to the NPR interview with the kid who is nekkid on the cover of Nirvana's breakthrough CD, I will forever think of 'Nevermind' as The Baby Penis Album. (Kids, "albums" were these shiny black things with a hole in the middle… oh well, whatever, never mind.)

If Mike's post made you nostalgic for the nineties (that was a really tough sentence to write), you can do it fairly cheaply: Amazon has the MP3 version of Nevermind on sale for only five dollars. (I'd say something about Amazon being the man who sold the world, but that's a different album.)

I myself did not smell the teen spirit when Kurt Cobain's magnum opus took the world by storm in 1991, but at these prices, maybe I'll check it out. Who says I'm not hip?

image: Amazon.com

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BPA-Free? Not So Much

Amy Kuras — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:54:00 GMT

We're all worried these days about bisphenol-A (or BPA), a chemcial that leaches from hard, clear plastic polycarbonate baby bottles and can cause disruptions ot the endocrine system
So what a fabulous idea from Amazon to open their BPA-Free Baby Store, gathering a selection of their products that don't use the chemical and putting them all in one place on the site.
Only one problem: Some of the products do contain BPA.
According to Z Recommends, which uncovered the problem, only four of 14 products lumped in the BPA-Free Store contained BPA, and of those, two had it in the handles or a flip-top that covered a sippy spout –in other words, areas that were unlikely to leach (BPA leaches when the plastic containing it is heated, which is why bottles are such a concern).
Two of the others, though, were bottles: Gerber's ComfortHold bottle and Dr. Brown's standard bottle. In the case of the Dr. Brown's bottle, it may have been a mix-up –the company recently introduced a glass bottle and announced plans to release a BPA-free plastic one, but clicking on the product ID number went right to their polycarbonate models.
None of the manufacturers are claiming their products are BPA-free – Amazon, however, did. A quick check of Amazon before I posted this found the offending products gone from the BPA-Free Shop, nore did they come up in a search for "BPA-Free."

Z Recommends has a very detailed report on the issue on their site, so follow the link. Their main concern, and mine, is that people could be misled into buying bottles that have BPA in them. Being a smart consumer saves the day.

Diaper Deliveries: Godsend or Dumb Trend?

Amy Kuras — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 23:04:00 GMT

Along with an addiction to Gilmore Girls and an inability to tolerate rigid parenting philosophies, I developed a serious aversion to shopping when my daughter was born. Other than shoes, books, Ikea and Target, I do not enjoy trolling the aisles of anywhere, for anything, ever.

Online shopping comes in really handy, but shopping online for things like diapers and wipes never occurred to me – when I was still pretty new at this, Target or Costco runs for baby necessities were a much-needed excuse to get out of the house.

For awhile, the conventional business wisdom was that online retailers couldn't compete for that slice of the market. Diapers cost too much to ship and their profit margins are razor thin. Stores use good deals on diapers to get shoppers in the door and then make up the money on everything else you buy while you're there. Seriously, I can’t be the only person incapable of leaving Target with way too many things I hadn't planned on buying, right?

But according to this New York Times story, a few retailers, including Amazon.com and Diapers.com, have figured out a way to do this profitably, at prices competitive with big box stores. Where online retailers like Pets.Com failed, they are finding success by finding the absolute cheapest way to ship their products, for example. Plus, free-spending parents typically pick up other things like baby gear at either e-tailer.

What do you think? Is online shopping for diapers a great idea, or laziness of the highest order?