January 13, 2007
I will warn you up front that in this entry, I am going to pass judgment on a fellow human being, which is something I try to refrain from doing so much these days.
However.
After dinner tonight, Keith and I were considering our evening entertainment options, and decided that maybe staying home and playing a board game and having some ice cream would be nice for a change. This plan was roundly agreed to, but had one fatal flaw: namely, the lack of ice cream in our freezer. So I said, hey, why don't I take Stazi to the store and both kids will get some one-on-one parent time and I'll pick up a few other things that we're desperately low on or out of entirely, and everybody wins?
So, we went to the grocery store, which was surprisingly busy for 7:30 PM on a Saturday night. It's been a while since I was at the grocery store any time other than a weekday morning; in college I used to prefer shopping for groceries at more unusual hours, like 3 AM, but these days I like being able to buy stuff from the deli counter, the meat counter, and the bakery. And buying produce that has not been sitting out in the bins for like 8 hours already. But I digress.
Anyway, we spent longer than we probably should have, and I splurged and got some sugar-free Jello pudding and the good sugar-free ice cream (regular ice cream for Keith, natch), finished up, and got in line for the checkout. I made the always-critical mistake of not doing a visual inspection of the person unloading the cart in front of me when I chose my aisle. If I had done such an inspection, I would have noticed that the lady in question had not one, but two carts full of food, and a thick stack of newspaper advertisements stuffed into the child seat of the cart. Bad news, folks, very bad news.
Anyway, I blithely unloaded my stuff, and then stood and waited while the lady in front of me finished up. And waited. And waited some more. After a couple of minutes, I looked up from the tabloid headlines to figure out what the hell the holdup was, and saw that the lady in front of me was making full use of the store's "we match all competitors' sale prices" policy by pointing out, as she unloaded each and every item from her two overflowing carts, where it was on sale in another store's newspaper ad.
She was not organized about this. She'd pick up, say, six cans of tuna from the cart, and then flip flip flip through her ads until she found the tuna ad, and then realize, oops, I really bought eight cans of tuna, and shuffle through all the stuff in her cart(s) until she found the two stray cans. Then she'd pick up the orange juice, and flip flip flip flip through the ads until she found the OJ ad, except whoops, that's Kroger's ad, not Giant Eagle's ad, and I know Giant Eagle had the lowest orange juice price...
I stood in line behind this lady for fifteen minutes waiting for her to check and cross-check her six different grocery ads. I know this because I checked the clock. Fifteen minutes is a long-ass time to wait in line behind a single person in the grocery line. And yet, that in and of itself could be forgivable, because you know, everyone likes to save some money, and she's just making full use of the store policy, right?
Here's where I pass judgment. I like saving money at the grocery store. I keep a freaking Access database of grocery prices. I use coupons. I buy things on sale in bulk. I have posted about all of this before, so you all know I am not kidding when I say I am somewhat fanatical about grocery prices. So I sympathize when someone is trying to save some money on the grocery bill.
But this lady, who could not even be bothered to organize her damn grocery list in order to waste slightly less of the cashier's, other customers', and her own time, and who apparently cares so much about saving money at the grocery store that she is willing to go through six different newspaper ads finding the lowest prices and then spending nigh unto half an hour at the checkout reviewing them with the cashier: Her cart was full of name-brand items. Like, Huggies diapers and microwaveable instant soup and Kraft cheese and Lean Cuisine frozen dinners, and so forth.
I usually don't comment on what other people have in their grocery carts. Really, I don't, because occasionally at the grocery store I unload like ten cans of peanut butter and fifteen microwave burritos, which I'm sure might cause an eyebrow or two to lift. But if you are so FREAKING concerned with saving EVERY LAST DIME it would seem to me that it would occur to you, at some point in this lengthy grueling process, that you could save all of the money and more that you saved on the goddamned ad-matching policy BY BUYING THE GENERIC BRANDS AND SHOPPING THE SALES, THE GOOD LORD GAVE YOU A BRAIN SO WHY NOT USE IT!?!!!?? #*($)#*$(#)$*#(&
Ahem.
Tomorrow's entry will be back to happy fluffy rainbow kittens, I promise.
Posted at January 13, 2007 9:01 PM