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Miss Saigon – Value Town certified!

Once a week, my girlfriend and I get a craving for Pho.  There’s only one place in SF we trust to give us ultimate value.  Miss Saigon’s prices are excellent (average of $7 per dish) and the staff is very courteous.  The place is kept very clean and our food is usually served within 10 minutes of ordering.  The food is delicious and the portions are perfect.  I never leave hungry.  They are open 7 days a week so any day can be value town Pho for me.

Since we typically drive to eat, having free parking is a big plus.  The first few times we came here, we would park at a metered spot and I’d have to put in $2 to cover our time there.  The most annoying thing was always having to find quarters to fill the meter.  There were occasions where I had to exchange for quarters in the restaurant and run back to the parking spot to pay the meter.

So in typical value town fashion, I looked around for free parking and both Minna Street/Natoma Street have free parking.  The best thing about these spots is that they are a 1 hour limit so there is almost always a spot open.  I’d say I’m 10 for 10 in my last 10 visits.  Actually, we started going here so often that we have been upgraded to “VIP” status with a free desert after every meal.  We noticed all the regulars get free deserts brought to them.  They don’t bring out the same desert either.  We’ve had three of four different types of deserts, all ranging from a taste of red bean to coconut.  My advice is if you start visiting here, chit chat with the staff and let them know how much you enjoyed their service/food at the end of your meal.  You’ll be on the quick track to VIP status!

The only knock I can give Miss Saigon is the location.  It’s located in the Tenderloin, which isn’t the nicest district in San Francisco.  You’ll frequently see homeless people walking around yelling in the street for no apparent reason.  That being said, I still feel safe walking around the area.  I’ve never been harassed by any of the street dwellers as of yet.

As I write this, my mouth is watering thinking about their Pho and Thai iced tea.  They value town the drinks here as well.  As you’ll see in the image below, the Thai iced tea drink glasses are HUGE!  Look how big my smile is.  That’s genuine happiness folks.  Next time you’re in San Francisco, stop by Miss Saigon for a value town meal – you won’t be disappointed.  They are located at 100 6th Street.

-Nauticaboy

ALSO: Miss Saigon has a new website – http://www.misssaigonsf.com that is optimized for portable devices. You can now order your favorite meals via your smartphone, laptop, desktop or even your tablet! Enjoy!

Delicious Vietnamese Food!

AT&T recently announced that it will be discontinuing the $10 for 1,000 text/month plan, leaving only unlimited text plans available as an option.

If you already have the $10 text/month plan, you will be able to keep the plan until you make a change on your account.  If you are currently unlimited and don’t use over 1000 texts a month, definitely switch now before that cheaper plan is gone!

This move from AT&T is likely in response to the Apple iOS 5 update that will include iMessage.  iMessage will allow iPhone, iPad/iPad 2 and iPod Touch users to text one another for free, using a wi-fi network or through the data plan.  Clearly, AT&T foresees their overall text usage to drop and they don’t want those customers to save the cash they would have by downgrading their text plans.  My advice is even if you use over 1,000 text messages a month now, find out whether most of the friends you text are using an apple device that supports iOS 5 and weigh that into consideration on whether or not to downgrade plans now, while you still can.  Again, you can always upgrade back to unlimited if that’s the best option.

This is typical AT&T trying to milk its users for all the revenue they can.  The old 200 text/month plan for $5 was discontinued in January of this year.  I have the $10 plan and was dismayed when I found out they discontinued the $5 plan. In checking my usage stats, I averaged only about 150 texts a month for the past year.  The basic rate for a text message with no plan is 20 cents for a standard message and 30 cents for a multimedia message.  Essentially, if I didn’t have a text plan, I would be paying $30 USD for my usage as opposed to the $10 I am paying now.  That’s how AT&T markets their plans to make you think you’re getting a “good deal.”

However, plenty of articles have showed how ridiculous this charge is compared to what it costs the carriers to provide the service.  The cost to a carrier, according to Srinivasan Keshav, a professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, is roughly .3 cents per text.  You would have to send more than 6,000 texts in a month before the carrier would start losing any money on the deal.  I don’t know anyone who texts that much, let alone half that much; and unless you are a bored teenager who is actively trying to see how many texts you can get in one month, I just don’t see it happening.

Don’t let AT&T take you to value town any more than they already are!

-Nauticaboy

The Official Seal of Value Town

There are several websites that I use to find value town deals. I’m going to share my favorite – slickdeals. The site is created and visited by value towners like myself. If you read the comment posts in some of the threads, that value town mentality becomes very apparent.

Slickdeals is a website I refresh at least 5 times daily. Deals are so hot sometimes, they are often gone shortly after making front page. I’ve memorized my credit card to speed up the purchasing process just because I’ve had a deal in my cart become “no longer available” when trying to finalize a purchase. The site works by using the power of the user community. Users post deals they find to be good and other users rate that deal with either a thumbs up or thumbs down. Posts with enough thumbs up will be flagged for a moderator to review. If the deal is confirmed by a moderator to be an extraordinaire deal, it is moved to the front page. Essentially, only best deals are on the front page. Every thumbs up a user receives for a post is saved on his or her account as “reputation”. Having a high reputation is mainly just bragging rights, but there is a daily giveaway that works like a raffle. Every reputation score you have is how many tickets you have, giving you a better chance to winning that day’s prize. My favorite thing about slickdeals as opposed to other deal websites is that since the deals are found by the community, there is large variety in deal offerings. Some deal sites, like Spoofee seem to be run by a single or small group of moderators that find and post deals.  The categories of deals they have tend to cater to a broader audience; so it’s somewhat difficult finding a deal for something particular, like a hotel deal at the Wynn in Las Vegas.  Slickdeals also has a search bar you can use to find a specific deal you are looking for. In fact, I’ve been in Hawaii this week for work and I needed some Hawaiian shirts. I saw Macy’s nearby and after a quick slickdeal search for “Macy’s,” I found out they are having a 25% off $100 or more deal this weekend. That worked perfectly as Hawaiian shirts run about $75-125 each.

My recommendation is before buying any deal, read the comments section first. Users are are usually very good about commenting about the product or vendor. Saving cash buying a poor product from an online vendor with a bad reputation is obviously not a slick deal. So next time you’re looking to buy something, check out slickdeals. It’s value town certified!

-Nauticaboy

The Official Value Town Seal

Welcome to the new section dedicated to all things value town related.  Value town is originally a term coined from Poker. It’s when a player knows he has the best hand, but still makes a bet hoping for a call. If the bet is called by a losing player, that player was taken to value town. The perfect bet is the largest bet the losing player would have called.  It’s a term that encompasses the idea of maximizing value.

Maximizing value is something I find extremely rewarding, especially in today’s weakened global economy. I am here to share with you Overidon.com readers my insights on every day valuetowning. This section will be dedicated to giving you the biggest bang for your buck. If you see the official seal in any post, you know it’s been verified to be a value proposition.

A little history about myself will reveal a little about my psyche and perhaps the reason behind my obsession with all things value town.

When I was in elementary school, I was given $2 every day to buy lunch. Lunch was $1.75 so I was able to keep a quarter. Each day, I put that quarter away into a yellow lunchbox. By the 5th grade I saved so many quarters that I started having trouble lifting the lunchbox. Even still, I considered it a good problem to have. I always carried it around with me. I counted my coins every weekend on the couch, beside my dad watching TV. It was tedious, but always satisfying.

Well one, day Street Fighter II came out for the SNES. I played the game several times in arcades and simply fell in love with it. Comboing hadoukens into shoryuken’s was addicting. I had to have the game! But of course, it was $70 USD and what 9 year old can afford that? I asked my parents to buy it for me, but I wasn’t getting the grades they wanted me to get to justify the purchase. Fortunately for me, I had my yellow lunchbox with exactly $94.75 in it.

I remember the exact day I was able to go into Toys”R”Us and pay for the game entirely in quarters. At first, the lady at the cash register gave me a look of disbelief. After she saw the smile I had on my face once the game was placed in a bag and handed to me, she smiled and said, “Congratulations.” She knew I saved a long time to buy the game. Years of saving and I was finally able to buy something the average 9 year old could never afford.

To this day, nothing to me is more satisfying than saving here and there on small things to buy the big things I really want. Instead of Street Fighter II, I’m looking to buy a home now. I’ve consciously saved during my six year working career for that “American dream.” I’m pleased to say I’m fairly certain I will accomplish that goal within the next couple of years.

-Nauticaboy