Occupy Connecticut Light and Power! The electric company of the Constitution State was charging an old Italian guy $220 a month for power in his condo. He knew the bills were wrong because he hardly used any electricity or gas at home. Meanwhile, his barbershop was tricked out with electric everything and plenty of A/C, and its bill only topped out at $150 a month.

He kept trying to tell the company that something was wrong. They kept saying the only thing wrong was he wasn’t sending checks fast enough. This went on for 10 years, before the guy’s son went in and straightened things out. (Why did that take 10 years, anyway?)

In the end, they finally had to cut him a check ... for guess how much?

Journalist Caitlin Kelly didn't intend to spend more than two years working behind the counter at The North Face. Yet that's exactly what happened when this veteran newspaper reporter faced an uncertain financial future and needed to make ends meet. What followed was Kelly's eye-opening account of life in customer service and sales in Malled: My Unintentional Career in Retail.

For anyone who has worked in retail, these humiliations and occasional triumphs will ring true. And for anyone who has been a difficult customer -- especially around the holidays -- this story will give you some insight as to how the other half lives. But you don't yell at minimum wage employees, do you?

Kelly is also positioned properly to give you some great holiday shopping tips before you head out next weekend. Here, the author of Malled gives you 10 tips (and two bonus tech tips!) on navigating the mall this holiday season.

When your two-bedroom bungalow gets a water bill big enough for an aquarium, of course your antennae are going to go up. But keeping your eye on every household bill on a monthly basis can be more of a challenge. Still, it’s worth it, as one woman discovered.

The error on Linda Sacash’s cable bill wasn’t huge, but it added up to a big difference in her bottom line. And even though the company told her she couldn’t do anything about it, she kicked up a fuss and got what was coming to her. Here’s what happened ...

In the heat of summer, in a record drought year, I think we all expect we’re going to see a jump in our utility bills. I lived in one house where the clunky, old air conditioner cost roughly $25 a day to run -- so we made sure it was pretty darn hot before turning it on and spent a lot of time in the kiddie pool out back.

But a monthly water bill for more than $50,000 ($53,061.92, to be exact)? It happened to a woman in Colorado. It said she had used more than 8 million gallons of water in a month. For comparison purposes, the Georgia Aquarium is the world's largest, and it has 10 million gallons of water. In contrast, Lisa Mannion’s home is an unassuming three-bedroom home with a drought-resistant garden (according to Google Street View).

What would you do if you opened a bill for that much? And what happened to make it jump?

My husband knows that before we make any major home purchase, there are two things I’m going to need: My drawer full of Bed, Bath & Beyond 20 percent off coupons, and my back-issues of Consumer Reports. My mom may not have taught me to keep the house clean or separate my laundry -- she’d rather be writing ... and who can blame her? -- but she did teach me to stretch my pennies 'til Abraham Lincoln looks like Gumby.
 
Consumer Reports is a non-profit organization that tests household products and rates them by durability and whether they’re worth the money you pay for them. They don't take ads, and they don’t care if companies get mad at them. So when it’s time to buy a vacuum cleaner and you want to know if Dyson really never loses suction, Consumer Reports is your impartial third-party, removing the hype from the infomercials.
 
And today (July 5, until 3 a.m. EST on July 6), they’re free.

We're all feeling patriotic these days. Enemy #1 is out of the picture, and we're thinking that we're pretty kick ass. So why not go the extra mile and turn that "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" chant into cold hard cash? Diane Sawyer is working on a Made in the U.S.A. campaign that shows what happens when a family removes any goods in their home that were not made in America. Turns out you can empty a single family home quite quickly using that method.

And it turns out that only spending an extra $3.33 on American goods can actually create 10,000 new jobs. So pay attention to those chain mails suggesting that from May 1 until June 1 we only buy goods, food, entertainment -- basically anything that is made in the U.S.A. -- to see if we can't boost the local economy.

This does not bode well for my planned shopping trip to IKEA, nor getting an iPhone for my husband. It will, however, completely justify my lust for a new Viking stove. Huzzah!

I am all for saving a few cents here and there ... alas, I'm not a big coupon gal (I never remember them and then when I do, they've expired), so I had to find an easy way to save some cash. So I've been buying generic. Buying the store-brand of whatever it is I'm needing.

Good idea, right? Yes, in theory. The sad thing is not all generic items are, well, very good. In my quest to pinch pennies, I've discovered a few things that I will never, not ever buy generic again and some fabu generic scores in the grocery store aisles that can save you $$$$! Let's all do the thrifty dance as I pass my list on to you ...

Gas station

As someone who just spent $50 filling up my tank with $4.55/gallon gas, these gas increases we're facing are putting a serious dent in my family's budget. Throwing $100 at our cars every week is so not cool. And even though this is Los Angeles, the rest of you around the USA will soon be feeling more pain at the pump as well.

Apparently gas prices should hit $4 a gallon all over the country any day now. Does anyone else feel like these increases are unbelievably arbitrary? That comes out to about an extra $5 to $12 per fill-up depending on what your previous gas rate was in your neighborhood. For us, we just went up about $8 from what we'd been spending, so an extra $16 a week has got to be found somewhere.

A few options that would work, but I totally don't love: