HinesSight

CarMax to open store in Salem in February 2020

I love CarMax. My wife and I have sold three of our cars there, getting a better price than was offered by local dealerships here in Salem, Oregon.


So I got excited when someone told me that they'd seen a sign near the I-5 freeway saying that a CarMax store was coming to town. It's taken more than five years for this to happen since a February 2014 Statesman Journal story by Michael Rose was titled, "CarMax on the course toward Salem location."

CarMax Inc., a giant in the used car business with 130 locations nationwide, has started laying the groundwork for a Salem dealership.

City records show that CarMax has filled a land-use application to partition property in the 365 to 395 blocks of Lancaster Drive SE, near the Santiam 11 cinemas. CarMax is interested in building on two vacant parcels that face Interstate 5.

I didn't find any mention of an upcoming Salem store on the CarMax web site, so I emailed their media relations department a few days ago. They said they'd get back to me soon, which they did. Here's the breaking news.

Hi Brian,

Thank you for your interest in CarMax. We are pleased to confirm that CarMax does indeed have plans to open a store in Salem, and we are looking forward to providing customers there with our simple and stress-free used car shopping experience. The location is slated to open in February of 2020.

Store Details and Hiring

The Salem location will be the company’s 3rd store in the state of Oregon. CarMax typically invests between $10 and $25 million on each store location depending upon the size of the store and its capabilities (service operations, reconditioning, auction services, etc.).

We anticipate hiring approximately 10-15 associates for this particular store and anticipate carrying inventory of about 100-150 used vehicles on the lot. CarMax maximizes customer choice by offering a large selection and by making our nationwide inventory of nearly 50,000 vehicles available for viewing on our website, www.carmax.com,  as well as our mobile app.

Upon request by a customer, CarMax will also transfer most used cars among the company’s 200+ stores which allows customers greater access to a much larger selection of inventory.

About CarMax
CarMax, the nation’s largest retailer of used cars, revolutionized the automotive retail industry by driving integrity, honesty and transparency in every interaction. CarMax continues to innovate and is currently rolling out an omni-channel experience, providing customers the option to complete transactions entirely from home, in store, or in a seamless combination of both. 

CarMax has more than 200 stores nationwide, and during the latest fiscal year sold nearly 750,000 used cars and 450,000 wholesale vehicles at its in-store auctions.  With more than 25,000 associates, CarMax is proud to have been recognized for 15 consecutive years as one of the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For®.  For more information, visit www.carmax.com.

Thanks again for reaching out, and we hope you’ll have a chance to shop at the store.

CarMax Public Relations

If you're not familiar with CarMax, it offers no-hassle car selling and buying. I've never bought a car from CarMax, but I'm familiar with the selling process -- which is marvelously efficient and pleasant, two words that don't describe my experience with getting offers from dealerships in Salem.

As the CarMax web site says, there's no haggling and no pressure. Here's how the process goes when someone wants to sell CarMax a vehicle. I'm assuming the buying process is equally smooth.

We've made an appointment ahead of time, since currently the closest CarMax store is in Beaverton, off of 217, and we want to be done before Portland-area rush hour traffic starts (of course, "rush hour" is just about any time of day now).  There's another store in the Portland area, but nowhere else in Oregon. So Salem is fortunate to be getting one.

It takes about 45 minutes for a car to be driven and inspected. The CarMax employees who do this are experts. I watched them do their thing when I took my Mini Cooper S in for an offer. My wife has handled the Toyota Highlander and Chevy Volt offers.

Then you get an offer sheet.

The price on it is a take-it-or-leave-it offer. As noted above, we've taken it on each of the three cars we've sold to CarMax, since the price was considerably more than what Salem dealerships were offering, even dealerships of the brand we were trying to sell.

Sure, if we sold the car on our own, there's a good chance we could have gotten more money. However, I've sold quite a few cars on my own, and it's never a pleasant process. Generally either nobody responds to an ad for weeks, and/or I get lowball calls from people who say "I see you're trying to sell your _____ for $15,000. Would you accept $7,000?" 

No. I wouldn't. 

The CarMax purchase offer is good for a week. If you decide to accept it, you simply bring the car to CarMax and walk up to the Business Office counter.

Then an employee quickly and courteously prints out the paperwork, and you're on your way with a check within half an hour or so, after they take a look at your car to make sure everything is out of it, and it's in the same condition as when the offer was made.

CarMax will even buy cars that are being leased, as was the case with the Chevy Volt we sold to CarMax this month. It can shift cars around the country, matching supply and demand, so that's part of the reason for CarMax's success.

But there's more to it than that.

When I complimented a CarMax employee on how smoothly their customer experience operates, she said, "We're always looking for ways to improve." I'm hoping that with CarMax coming to Salem, this will put pressure on local dealerships to improve the ways they sell and buy vehicles. 

Believe me, there's a lot of room for improvement. 

Our 2018 Chevy Volt lost half its value in 16 months

Today we said goodbye to our third, and last, Chevy Volt. My wife has loved the car so much, we've leased three Volts: in 2012, 2015, and 2018. 

It seemed like a good idea to lease, rather than buy, given the steady improvements in battery performance. (The Volt is a plug-in hybrid vehicle that switches over to a gas engine/generator after about 45-50 miles of all-electric driving.)

But we didn't anticipate that we'd buy a 2019 Toyota RAV4 Hybrid to replace our 2014 Highlander -- which came to seem like too large a car for our tastes. Plus it had zero safety features that we've come to rely on, like blind spot detection, rear cross traffic alerts, and such.

Having 20 payments left on our three-year Volt lease through GM Financial, our first thought was for Laurel to switch between driving the RAV4 and Volt. However, the more Laurel drove the RAV4, the more she preferred it to the Volt.

Thus our next thought was to get out of the Volt lease. Unfortunately, it was easier to think that thought than to convert it into reality.

In June of this year GM financial gave me a payoff-quote of $29,405. That's how much we'd have to pay to own the Volt. At that time we had 22 lease payments left at $468.82 a month, for a total of $10,314. 

So not counting insurance payments of about $40 a month, we figured that if we could find someone to buy our Volt for an amount somewhere upwards of $21,000, it would make sense to sell our car to them -- since if we weren't going to be driving the car much, if at all, paying less than $10,314 to GM Financial (plus whatever the car sold for) would leave us ahead, monetarily.

However, when I took the Volt to our local Chevrolet dealer, they only offered us $19,000 for the Volt -- which was a fully loaded Premier model that had a list price of $40,865.

The guys at the dealership explained that even before Chevy announced the Volt was being discontinued, they had a really hard time selling any. Now, the demand is even less. I told them that it made no sense to accept $19,000, since we'd have to pay over $10,000 more to GM Financial, the same amount of our remaining lease payments.

They agreed that it made no sense to sell the car at that price. 

This month, with a couple of additional lease payments made, we did two things. First, I called GM Financial to get another payoff-quote. This time it was $28,629. Then my wife took the Volt to CarMax in Beaverton, Oregon. She got an offer of $21,000, two thousand dollars more than our local Chevrolet dealership had offered.

Not great, since it seemed decidedly weird for the Volt to lose about half of its value in just 16 months. But we went with the offer, since selling the car to CarMax would save us $2,641 in lease and insurance costs, compared to keeping the Volt for the full three-year lease.

Live and learn. Leasing worked well for us the first two times we leased a Volt. Not so good this time. 

By the way, I put the car up for sale on Auto Trader for $25,000. We got exactly zero interest in it after a few months. Ditto for a listing on Swapalease.

So I'm pretty confident that the CarMax offer of $21,000 was in the ballpark of fairness, especially since it was more than a Chevrolet dealer was willing to pay for the car, which only had about 8,300 miles on it. Hopefully someone will enjoy our 2018 Volt as much as we did. 

(The "Kindness is Contagious" sticker was magnetic and didn't go with the car.)

 

I've written a new book: "Break Free of Dogma"

It feels great to have my new book go live on Amazon. My views about life, spirituality, God, and other Big Ideas have changed a lot since I wrote my previous three books. 

I still agree with much of what I said in them, but some parts make me sort of cringe. Break Free of Dogma is much closer to my current atheist philosophical perspective. 

It consists of 93 posts that I selected from the early years of my Church of the Churchless blog, 2004-06. So it was pretty easy to fashion, since I'd already written most of the content. Just needed to add an Introduction, delete links, and make a few edits to the original posts.

I also added a brief comment on each post from my current perspective. That allowed me to feel more comfortable with posts that were considerably more God-friendly than how I look upon spirituality now.

Here's a selfie I took today after Amazon delivered a print copy of the book.

I chose to have a painting of my mother when she was sixteen in the background, with her looking over my shoulder, because she was a huge book lover who would have enjoyed my book, being a spiritual-but-not-religious person herself.

I hate DirecTV even more than I hate Trump

Let me explain the title of this blog post. Trump isn't sitting under our television, controlling what my wife and I are able to watch in our rural south Salem (Oregon) home where the only TV choices are crappy DirecTV and crappy Dish Network.

So DirecTV has a much larger direct impact on my life than Donald Trump does. That's why I'm complaining about DirecTV rather than Trump, even though both are hugely irritating.

There's always something to hate about DirecTV. Let me count three of the ways, starting with the most recent -- which is the biggest current reason I detest DirecTV.

(1) We've lost our local CBS affiliate, KOIN in Portland, because DirecTV is engaged in a corporate pissing match with Nexstar that has caused DirecTV subscribers to lose access to 120 CBS stations. 

Naturally DirecTV is claiming it's all Nexstar's fault. I can't bear to read the B.S. on the DirecTV web site about the dispute with Nexstar. It's like trying to decide whether a rattlesnake or a tarantula is more lovable. I freaking hate both of them!

DirecTV won't say how much money is at stake here for its customers.

But let me make a guess that is almost certain to be correct: it's much less than the $10 a month my wife and I are paying to get the CBS All Access app on Apple TV, which allows us to see Late Night With Stephen Colbert, albeit a day after each show airs.

I couldn't care less about who is more in the right in the DirecTV vs. Nexstar fight. All I know is that we aren't getting one of the local stations that DirecTV promised us when we switched from Dish a number of years ago.

Yes, I'm sure somewhere in the fine print of the contract we signed it says something along the lines of "If DirecTV isn't able to provide all the stations you're supposed to get, suck it up and stop complaining."

This Washington Post story says it more delicately, in regards a separate contract dispute between DirecTV and CBS-owned stations in some large cities.

Customers sure are tired of this old song and dance. They don’t want to hear “CBS has put you into the middle of its negotiations,” which DirecTV tweeted to an angry customer on Saturday, or that “loyal viewers are now bearing the burden for AT&T’s unwillingness” to bend, as CBS put it in its own press release.

It doesn’t matter whether AT&T “dropped” the network or CBS “pulled its signal” from AT&T. Subscribers just want consistent service at a fair price, and that seems like it will be harder and harder to get, thanks to an industry that’s turning more anti-competitive to protect its profit margins in the wake of cord-cutting and consolidation.

(2) The DirecTV user interface was horrible for a long time, and is merely terrible now. After DirecTV made an "upgrade" to its interface, for months shows that we'd recorded would disappear, seemingly randomly. I kept complaining to customer service, to no avail. 

Often I could search for them, and find them after considerable trouble. Things are better now, but I still want the old interface back, which worked fine. 

(3) I've stopped counting how many years I've been unable to watch sports on the Pac 12 Networks, because DirecTV can't work out a deal with them. I've started subscribing to Sling TV during football season so I can watch the Oregon and Oregon State games that are only on the Pac 12 Networks. 

Again, I suspect the cost per subscriber for DirecTV to offer the Pac 12 Networks is way less than the $20-30 dollars a month I have to pay Sling TV. 

Yet we're trapped.

Dish is engaged in a contract dispute with HBO that has been going on since November of last year. There's several HBO shows we watch regularly, so jumping from crappy DirecTV to crappy Dish Network makes no sense. We're screwed either way we'd go with the only two satellite TV providers.

So I'm left with...

Can I find car-love with a Hyundai Kona after dating a VW GTI?

It feels like it could be time to break up with my 2017 VW GTI.

We've had close to three years together. I love her a lot. Our only rough spot came when her moonroof started to rattle, and it took a really long time for a dealer to figure out what the problem was, and to fix it.

Still, all of my car relationships come to an end. And I've been watching a lot of videos about what could be my next car-love, a 2020 Hyundai Kona.

The 2019 model is fine, but there's a few features on my GTI that I like so much, I can't do without them. Notably, adaptive cruise control and rain-sensing wipers. Plus safety features like blind spot detection. 

The top Kona trim, appropriately termed Ultimate, lacked adaptive cruise control in 2019. But pleasingly, the 2020 Ultimate Kona will have it. That led me to head over to our local Hyundai dealer here in Salem, Oregon today for a test drive of a 2019 Kona.

I enjoyed my time with Dane Caccamise of Withnell Hyundai. He was knowledgeable about the car and nicely low-key. I'd told him that I'd researched the Kona extensively, so my main concern was whether I'd enjoy driving it almost as much as my VW GTI.

Reviews of the Kona, both in print and on You Tube, were so positive, I was pretty sure that I'd like how the Kona drove. I was correct. 

The Ultimate Kona has the turbo engine and a dual-clutch transmission like the GTI. Even though the Kona only has 175 hp, compared to 220 hp in the GTI (if my memory serves me), the Kona felt just about as quick and responsive as my GTI.

The engine sound wasn't as sporty, except under hard acceleration, when the Kona came to life, sound-wise. But my wife would be pleased with this, as she considers the GTI to be too loud. Partly that's because of the low-profile tires on the GTI. With less rubber between the wheel and the road, road noise is higher.

And after driving the Kona, I have to admit that my GTI did feel a bit too sporty. The suspension is stiff, so you feel imperfections in the road more than I felt them in the Kona.

I like that AWD is available with the Ultimate Kona, since we live in rural south Salem where, when it snows, our long steep driveway is tough to navigate without winter tires. With winter tires and AWD, I'd be more comfortable driving around in snow or ice.

Color remains undetermined. I like the Sunset Orange color. I see a lot of orange Subaru Crosstrek's driving around Salem, but I think the Kona has a richer metallic orange. A plus to this color is that for the 2020 Kona Ultimate , the interior has orange trim for more interest.

(Before, only the controversial lime green Kona had matching interior trim.)

My wife likes the Surf Blue color. But since I'd be the primary driver of the Kona, my preference might win out. And since Laurel absolutely hates the Lime Twist color, orange might appeal to her the way a slap on the wrist is preferable to a baseball bat strike to the head.

There's lots of You Tube reviews of the Hyundai Kona.

But so far as I can tell, there's only one Labrador Retriever review. It doesn't have a heck of a lot of views, but I liked the quirky humor of the Lab's owner. We have two dogs, so every car that enters our household has to be dog-friendly.

The Kona is four inches shorter than my GTI, but the storage area behind the rear seats seems as large, or even larger. The rear seats don't fold completely flat, but if I got a big comfy dog bed like the one in this video, I think our dogs would be just fine with the Kona.

 

Hood House will provide housing for five homeless Salem women

There's so much wrong going on in the world, it's refreshing to be able to report on something very much right.

Russ and Delana Beaton, long-time advocates for the homeless here in Salem, Oregon, have created an innovative housing opportunity for five previously homeless women.

The Beatons are members of a monthly discussion group that my wife and I belong to, so we've been kept up to date on the progress of their Hood House -- named for the street it sits on in northeast Salem.

Here's how Hood House was described by Delana in an emailed invite to last Tuesday's open house.

Last December Russ and I purchased a five bedroom two story home at 1160 Hood Street NE to be used to house five women age 55 and older who have low fixed incomes and have been priced out of market rent housing.

 

It has taken many long months of extensive renovation and dealing with a variety of challenges. But, finally, Hood House is ready to receive its first occupants. The whole home is scrubbed, painted, furnished and decorated.  Kitchen and bathrooms are renovated and upgraded. ARCHES is actively looking for women to refer under their Coordinated Entry System (CES). 

 

We are excited and hope you can come to our Open House to show friends of Hood House how it looks now and what will welcome the first five women.  This will be permanent housing and will be their home.  I will facilitate a weekly house meeting for processing concerns that might arise.  We plan to take dinner in weekly at the same time.

 

Open House will be Tuesday, July 30, from 3:30 - 5:30 PM.  Light refreshments will be served.   Hope you can come!

Not only could I come, so did my iPhone. It was great to see Mayor Chuck Bennett at the open house, along with City Councilors Chris Hoy and Cara Kaser. Other councilors and City officials may have come before or after my visit. Here's photos of Hood House, along with my commentary.

I believe the house was built in the 1920s. Or maybe 1940s. Regardless, it used to be in much worse shape than it is now. Looks very inviting from the sidewalk. 

Inside the front door the Beatons had put up a sheet giving credit to everybody who made Hood House possible. Reflecting their wonderful humility, they'd put their own names way down at the bottom. But of course Russ and Delana deserve the bulk of the credit for this creative way of providing a place to live for five homeless women.

Here's the Mission Statement of Hood House. Click to enlarge. I'll also share the statement below.

It is the mission of Hood House to create a comfortable, attractive, affordable, and safe home for five women, each of whom is age 55 or older, and is of limited financial means. Each woman will have a separate, private and lockable bedroom. All common spaces -- kitchen, living room, dining room, family room, bathrooms, laundry room, front porch, back deck, and lower patio -- will be shared and managed cooperatively by the residents. Hood House is permanent housing, not transitional.

At our last discussion group meeting, Delana had shared the tale of the Too Low Microwave. When an inspector from the City of Salem came by, the Beatons were told that the recently-installed microwave was six inches too close to the stovetop.

So the cabinets above the stove had to be cut down at considerable expense. That was just one of many hurdles Delana and Russ had to overcome to make the dream of Hood House a reality.

The living room is adjacent to a nice covered rear deck. The floors look great. Now. It took a lot of work to remove whatever was on top of the wood, the details of which I've forgotten.

This is one of the bedrooms.

Here's another bedroom. Some of the furniture was donated. But I'm pretty sure the Beatons found most of the used furniture at thrift stores and other places. The energy and enthusiasm they put into this complex house renovation project was amazing.

I'm 70, younger than Russ and Delana are. But whenever they talked about what they had to do to get the house ready for occupancy, I got exhausted just listening to a description of all that work.

Another bedroom. Being sort of matching-impaired myself, I was impressed with the coordinated color scheme in each bedroom, as well as the whole house.

After someone brought flowers and set them on a table, I was struck by how well they matched a piece of art in the front room. (My iPhone's camera had trouble dealing with sunlight streaming through the window.)

The cake was delicious. And the message is going to bring smiles to the five women who end up living in Hood House.

Lots of people have lots of opinions about how to deal with Salem's homeless problem. It's super-inspiring that Russ and Delana Beaton, who already have been putting in many, many hours of volunteer service to homeless people, decided to go one big step further and bring Hood House into being.

Here's praise for Abiqua Irrigation and Dan's Leak Detection

When you live on ten acres in rural south Salem, there's always something going wrong. I am that "you," along with my wife, so I know what I'm talking about.

OK, not always, because that would be 24/7. But definitely things go wrong often.

Which happened a couple of weeks ago when we noticed that two of our sprinklers were mysteriously running longer than they should have. 

In fact, they wouldn't shut off at all. So I had to turn off the water to the entire sprinkler system while we figured out what the problem was. A control valve, obviously, which I had neither the competence nor the interest to fix myself.

Plus, there was another problem in addition to the stuck-on sprinkler problem.

We weren't sure that we knew where the valve box was. The green-lidded in-ground boxes that were visible weren't close to the malfunctioning sprinklers, which worried me. I became even more worried when neither my wife nor I could find a map that we'd made of the valve boxes, even after looking for a long time.

So here's a lesson for both us and anyone reading this post. Don't lose track of your sprinkler valve boxes.

This being July, the first sprinkler repair companies I called in the Salem, Oregon area all said that they were scheduling at least two weeks out. However, I got lucky after I left a message with Abiqua Irrigation and Backflow. Someone had cancelled an estimate appointment, so Dustin could come out on Monday of the following week.

I'd mentioned that we weren't sure of where the valve box was, so Dustin of Abiqua Irrigation brought a gadget that senses either the ground wire or a live wire in a sprinkler system. He hooked up a gizmo to the controller box in our garage, then set out to trace a wire to the missing valve box.

We knew it was missing, because Dustin turned on and off each of the valves in the boxes we knew about. None of them were connected to the stuck-on sprinklers. 

Dustin looked and looked, for about two hours. The beeping machine indicated some possibilities, but when we dug and probed, there was no valve box. He didn't charge me for his time, since he didn't find the valve box, which I thought was very generous. I then called a landscape company that we'd used to design and build our small water feature.

I was told that whenever they can't locate a sprinkler box, they use Dan's Leak Detection. It turned out that in addition to finding a leak, Dan also can locate missing sprinkler valve boxes.

When he came out to our yard, Dan used the same approach Dustin had, though he had a different variety of wire tracer that could indicate how deep a wire was buried. Strangely, though, Dan spent over half an hour looking for the valve box, focusing on the same area of our yard that Dustin and I had zeroed in on. An island surrounded by grass.

It's weird that both Dan and Dustin couldn't trace the wires that lead to the missing valve box, since they said their success rate is high. My theory is that because we have a well with very high iron and magnesium  content, and the sprinkler system uses that untreated water, somehow the electrical signal got confused by the mineral rich soil.

Regardless, Dan had to go to his backup approach.

A gadget that, when connected to a certain zone in the control box, forces the valve capacitor to turn on and off rapidly, 150 times a minute, I believe. Dan had a headphone device ready to use, but the noise of the capacitor was so loud, we could tell exactly where the missing box was.

And not only one missing box, but two other missing valve boxes, one of which was near the malfunctioning valve. They'd gotten grown over with grass, and we'd lost track of them.

So Dan's Leak Detection saved the day by finding the missing valve boxes. I then called Dustin at Abiqua Irrigation and asked him to come back and replace the innards of the malfunctioning valve, which he did today, accompanied by his son.

Both Abiqua Irrigation and Dan's Leak Detection are small family-owned businesses, where family members work. I can recommend both highly. Dustin and Dan were pleasant, friendly, open, honest, and on-time.

It was frustrating to lose track of the valve boxes, but not that we've found them, we're going to use maps and photos to make sure that we never lose them again. Yeah, us old people can learn new tricks.

Photos of the 2019 Salem Art Fair & Festival

The Salem Art Fair & Festival always is hugely enjoyable. During our Friday visit, when I took these photos, I believe my wife and I spent more on food than on art, but, hey, artistry is involved in the food booths.

This year I was told the secret of the So Cheesy food truck/food stand, but if I divulged why their grilled cheese sandwiches taste so good, I might be punished by the So Cheesy gods.

Click on the image below to behold the Adobe Spark web page I made, complete with compelling commentary on the photos.

Here's my petition supporting LBGTQ rights in Salem

Please sign this petition I just started to support the Salem Human Rights Commission in its stand against the City of Salem leasing a building from the Salem Alliance Church to temporarily house the public library.

Click on this link to the Care2 Stand up for LGBTQ rights in Salem! petition.

The church rejects same-sex marriage and considers same-sex sex to be a sin. The Commission is calling on City officials to find another location for the library while renovations are made, even if that location costs more and is less convenient.

CBD drops seem to be helping our dog's liver disease

About six weeks ago my wife and I were told by our vet that our nine year old Shepherd mix (ZuZu) was in the late stages of her chronic liver disease and likely only had a few days or at most, weeks, to live.

Her belly was filling up with fluid. Her eyes were yellowish. She was lethargic and didn't want to eat. 

Along with having the fluid aspirated twice, putting her on milk thistle drops, diuretic, antibiotic, and a cortisone medication, I decided it wouldn't hurt to get some dog CBD -- the non-psychoactive component of marijuana. 

Twice a day we've been putting a dropperful of Select Pets CBD drops, chicken flavor, in her food. 

Naturally this isn't a controlled experiment. I can't prove that the CBD drops are helping ZuZu. All I know is that her vet has told us that she's amazed at how well ZuZu is doing, given how dire her recent prognosis was.

And keep in mind that when the vet told us ZuZu only had days or weeks to live, that was with all the medications the vet had prescribed. Which didn't include CBD, as that was my decision.

ZuZu (photo taken just now above) has pretty much her old amount of energy. Her appetite is strong, though this could be a side effect of the cortisone. There's been no return of the fluid buildup. 

My wife and I are grateful for ZuZu's recovery, even if it is temporary. Maybe the CBD drops are partly responsible for her improved health. Heck, it could be more than partly. 

I'm a believer in CBD myself.

I take CBD drops several times a day for general health promotion. I've read enough about the therapeutic effects of cannabis in general, and CBD in particular, to conclude that the risks of taking it are hugely less than the potential benefits.

So it was easy for me to believe that CBD could benefit our dog, with little chance that it would hurt her.