New York: Woodbury Commons

I guess I'm a little late to the game but I finally made it out to the outlet stores at Woodbury Commons.

Years ago, The Porn King had told me that Alfred Dunhill had an outlet shop here. A place to find our favorite British accoutrements at discount prices? Sounds good to me. As it turned out, I never made the time to drive out here until today as I was sitting at Frank Pepe's trying to decide what to do next. The map on my iPhone pointed me through NYC but rush hour on a Friday night was no time to brush through the city and I took a circuitous route through Danbury.

Truth be told, I'm not a big fan of shopping. Oh sure, I enjoy gawking at the latest gadgets at Home or Restaurant Depot, but put me in a Saks Fifth Avenue and I'm dying. Can't stand it. Woodbury is chock filled with "high end" retailers - don't really know their names so I can't tell you, but my old standby Alfred Dunhill no longer has an outlet store here. Bummer. No leather sachet for me.

But all is not lost. By sheer luck, I happened to park right where I needed to be: smack dab in the middle of the Le Creuset and Williams-Sonoma outlet stores - not to mention the L'Occitane outlet just a short walk away. This is both good news and bad news.

The good news is that I love buying quality kitchen supplies at a discount. The bad news is that I have to spend money to buy those discounted kitchen supplies. But with our failing economy, I thought I would do my share to prop up our nation by charging these goods to my credit card and, thereby, extending our national burden even more in the hope that a complete crash of our economy will destroy our financial system, pushing the government to wiping out all of our personal debt.

Hell, if the government can bail out the corporations, they can bail me out too...

Le Creuset is discontinuing their Cactus line of products, which means that everything cactus (dark green) is 35% off. That sounds like a lot but then you realize that this is a Le Creuset store, which means they're pricing everything at their normal MSRP and discounting that price. But still, a 3.5 quart dutch oven for $107 isn't a bad deal. And the mini gratin dishes for six bucks is a pretty good deal. I went with the mini gratin dishes and a butter bell for the kitchen.

At the Williams-Sonoma outlet things took a bit of a different turn. Here, they actually have a lot of stuff on discount. Remnant items, leftovers and things they really want to get rid of. I got a wonderful Laguiole knife for $2.50, an ISI soda charger for $20 and a Le Creuset yellow 2 quart oval for $45. But the one that I just couldn't resist was the Cuisinart CPC-600 six quart pressure cooker. I had been eyeing for quite some time but kept putting it off. Then I saw it sitting there, calling out my name and I just had to. Fifteen percent off of $149.

Fifteen percent sounds like a decent deal but this is New York State where socialism dictates a sales tax of 8.12%, reducing the fifteen percent discount by more than half. No wonder we order stuff online.In this case though, the price on Amazon is $149 and even a measly six point something percent discount is better than nothing, so I go for it.

L'Occitane has been my favorite soapmaker for about ten years now but their 250g bars of soap are the standard ten bucks. Lame. I'm not going to pay two percent more in sales tax just to buy lavender soap. Happily, they've got two 500g bars of soap for nine bucks! Two kilos of soap later, I'm back out of the store for under twenty bucks - and my lady friends can be assured that I'll be reasonably clean for a couple more months.

8pm and I'm kinda bored. I could go to the city and party the night away. Call up some friends and crash. Truth is, I've exhausted my funding for this trip and I'm just getting bored on the road. Time to head home.