Blogging since 1998. By David Wertheimer

Month: March 2025

Car bloat

Source: carsized.com

Oversize SUVs are making traffic worse, in Bloomberg.

I bought my family an SUV in early 2023, and it was the first time in my life that I owned a car that was more than fifteen feet long. While spacious inside, at 186″ in length ours is still considered relatively small by modern SUV standards.

Truthfully, those modern standards are totally out of whack with how big our personal vehicles should and need to be. All that mass results in lower fuel economy, faster tire degradation and more wear-and-tear on our already strained roads.

A friend bought a GMC Yukon XL that makes him laugh with glee at its ridiculousness. At 225.2″ in length, it is a more than three and a half feet longer than any of the cars I owned prior to 2023. It’s subtantially taller and wider, too.

Here’s an example of how much things have changed. In high school, our friend Frank’s dad had a brand-new, loaded 1991 Toyota Land Cruiser. It was huge! When he drove it to school we all wanted to check it out. We called it the Frank Tank.

That huge, show-stopping Frank Tank (188.2″ long, 72″ wide) is slightly smaller than a run-of-the-mill 2025 Hyundai Santa Fe (190.2″ and 74.8″).

Life’s little mysteries

A mobile phone battery lasts a couple of days on a charge, at best.

The battery in a car key fob expires after about a year.

Leave AA batteries in a remote for more than four or five years and they corrode and stop working. Sometimes they ruin the entire device.

Smoke- and carbon monoxide detectors have a 10-year lifespan; then their batteries (and detectors) become unreliable and need to be thrown away.

Meanwhile, the Thinner brand digital scale that we got in 2003 is still chugging away, and is 100% accurate to more than 200 pounds, on its original battery.

Kudos to the team behind this scale, which really was built to last.

My jeans

For many years, I had a delightful clothes shopping routine: when I needed a new pair of blue jeans, I would go to Barneys Co-op and try on more or less everything in my size until I found one that met both my criteria (lays nice, all cotton, soft) and my wife’s (flat front, nice shape). I’d buy a pair—preferably on sale, because Barneys could get silly—and then immerse myself into the brand for a while, knowing I had found something that worked, and jeans are usually a repeatable purchase.

My process was quite fun, if a little hit-or-miss. I bought a fantastic pair from Citizens of Humanity, then followed up with a pair of their gray (non-denim) jeans, then discovered that Citizens stopped making 100% cotton pants in favor of elastane blends, so I stopped. Barneys once sold me an amazing pair of vintage-cut Levi’s 501s, which I wore sparingly, because I’ve never found a second pair of Levi’s that fit as well.

But when it worked, it worked. Barneys led me to Earnest Sewn, which were handsome and unbelievably comfortable, and I bought several pairs over the years. Earnest Sewn went out of business, and the founder created a new brand called 3×1; Barneys sold me my first pair of those, too, and I soon had more than one.

Then a few things happened, in rather rapid succession.

  • 3×1 went out of business.* This was disappointing but fine—shopping for new jeans is fun. Except a few weeks later…
  • Barneys closed. This was a long time coming, but especially sad. No more Co-op; no more Warehouse Sales; no more cutting-edge aspirational department store. And, for me especially, no more vast jeans department. Which almost immediately didn’t matter, because within weeks of that…
  • The pandemic hit, and we all stopped shopping in stores for a good long while.

* Nowadays, of course, brands never die, so both Earnest Sewn and 3×1 are back on the market, with their same logos but not the same products. I’m not interested in them at that level.

By mid-2020, I was in a pants rut: my current jeans were wearing out, my preferred maker was gone, and my preferred store for finding new jeans was gone, too. I poked around online and bought a pair or two of other brands, notably one from Raleigh Denim, which I quite liked until they ripped on me within a year (customer service cited “old fabric” and declined to repair them). Not great.

So, in a fit of desperation and creativity, I started crawling the internet and accumulating 3x1s.

I kept my focus narrow. Two styles, one waist size, new or near-new only. I looked at a bunch of websites (Grailed, Poshmark) and discovered, improbably, that eBay was my best source. In all, I bought eight pairs of jeans between February 2020 and July 2023.

This process was imperfect, by which I mean all sales were final, and not all of them fit. Recall that I used to try on a zillion pairs of jeans at a time. Despite the labeling, not every pair was cut the same way; some were too tight in the waist, others too narrow for my body type. But I was also paying pennies on the dollar for old jeans, so I made my peace with the process, and hoped half of them worked out.

My family laughed at me more than once, but the process paid off more than once, too. Interestingly, the jeans I found were quite different from one another. Two pairs looked just like my old ones, and I wear them all the time. A third was extraordinarily soft, and became my go-to WFH pair, although they wore out in the knee rather quickly. Still a nice find.

And I write this blog post today because I just pulled out my greatest find: a new-with-tags selvedge denim pair, original price still stickered ($365!), which were tight when I bought them but now fit me perfectly. I’m wearing them with pride, as though I found them at the store this weekend.

At some point I am going to exhaust my collection of 3x1s. I hope by the time I do I’ll have found a new store where I can have fun trying on new jeans in person.

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