Are Cloth Diapers Really a Better Deal?

I have some number crunching to do, but I wanted to jot down some thoughts and get some feedback from those of you out there… feel free to comment on the blog or send me an email at dana (At) babykicks.com with your ideas. I’ve also started a conversation in the BabyKicks forum:

http://www.babykicks.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=5

Here is some of my preliminary scratching:

A box of 144 size 3 Pampers Baby Dry is $36.99 on drugstore.com which works out to about $0.25 per diaper. Let’s say you use 8 diapers a day, that’s $730 per year on diapers. Assume approximately 2.5 years of diaper use… $1825 in diapers.

At press time, the new BabyKicks one-size fitted diaper costs $16.95, and Joey-Bunz (medium) cost $5.50 each. (Unless you check out the the BabyKicks eBay store and get a deal on some slightly irregular Joey-Bunz!)

Let’s say you buy 16 diapers and 20 medium Joey-Bunz (approximately 2 days and a full washer’s worth). That would cost you $381.20 in materials, which is almost half the price of a year’s worth of Pampers. The BabyKicks one-size diaper grows with your baby, so you don’t need to get a range of sizes, which saves a few dollars, too. Hmmm. Let me think about that some more!

Money aside, consider all of those big boxes of diapers, juggling a baby in your shopping cart while the big box slides out… and watching endless bags of trash leave your house on garbage day. Wow.

There is so much more in play here- like the fact that quantities in those disposable diapers get smaller as the sizes get bigger, older babies use fewer diapers, the cost of washing, etc. I have some homework to do for sure…

I also need to go to Walmart and jot down the price of the biggest box of Parent’s Choice brand, as well as compare to Seventh Generation and other options.

I’d also like to know how many disposable diapers people use in a day, or how many cloth diapers people use in a day… how many cloth diapers you keep “on hand” and more.

I’ll be trolling the Pin, and other resources for calculations, rules of thumb and guidelines- please feel free to point me in the direction of your favorites.

Discounted BabyKicks on Ebay!

BabyKicks has begun listing slightly irregular Joey-Bunz on Ebay! This is a rare opportunity to get your hands on some great inserts at low prices. I’ve seen these “seconds” (in fact, my entire personal collection of Joey-Bunz consists of these slightly irregular inserts) and they are fantastic. They might have been put in the seconds pile for being slightly off-shape, or perhaps they had to be restitched. They work just as well as first quality Joey-Bunz, they just didn’t meet the BabyKicks ultra-high cosmetic quality standards.

Check out the BabyKicks ebay store at: http://stores.ebay.com/BabyKicks