How to Get the Most Out of Your Yankee Candle Scentstories Player

A few years ago, Febreze began selling an innovative new home air freshener called a Scentstories Player, which "plays" special scented discs in much the same way a CD player plays a compact disc. The Febreze Scentstories Player developed a small, but loyal following and many consumers loved the idea of being able to add scent to their favorite room without burning a candle or having an air freshener plugged in all of the time. With Scentstories, you got fragrance where you wanted, when you wanted. Unfortunately, the Febreze players were too expensive for the mass market, and by 2006, it was getting harder and harder to find Scentstories players or discs in grocery stores or "big box" retailers.

Then late last year, Yankee Candle Company announced that they had purchased the rights to market the Scentstories product line from Proctor & Gamble. Scentstories owners everywhere were delighted with the news, however, the move from mass market to specialty retail meant that the players and discs increased substantially in price. A Scentstories player went from as low as $16.99 at Wal-Mart all the way up to $26.99 at Yankee Candle. Discs that were $5.99 were now $7.50 when you bought them at a Yankee Candle store or the YankeeCandle.com website. (For a comprehensive review of the Yankee Candle Scentstories Player, be sure to check out my previous Associated Content article.)

With the price increase, I have begun to wonder if my Scentstories player was really the best way to meet my home-fragrancing needs. The packaging on the discs said that each one would last for "up to 50 hours," which at $7.50 a pop means you'll be spending $0.15 for every hour you are using your Scentstories player. That puts the price in line with burning a wax tart from Yankee Candle, which costs approximately $0.16 per hour. Yankee sells electric tart burners, and the wax tarts give a much stronger scent than a Scentstories player, so the only way I could justify the continuing expense of Scentstories discs was to find a way to make them last longer. With this in mind, I set out to experiment.