My Best Grocery Deal

Everyone loves a bargain. One of my favorite "Cathy" comics has the girls exchanging gifts and bragging how little they actually spent on each other because of sales, discounts, credit card points, etc. I shop just like that, but I refrain from telling the bride "Your gift was worth $110 originally, and I got it for $27.50!"

My best bargain was at my local Dominick's grocery store. By best I mean percentage, not actual cash saved. I get a bigger thrill from getting 90% off a dollar item than saving 1.1% on a $25,000 new car.

My Dominick's is one of the few stores around her that put clearance stickers on food. Some are great bargains, like rib eye steaks that are facing their "sell by date. I bring them home and stick them in the freezer immediately. Others I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole, like catfish. You can smell their "sell by" date just walking by the cooler.

Even though I avoid questionable fish, I stopped to look one day and saw a bunch of containers of seafood salad. I don't usually buy that sort of thing since making it is usually half the cost, but these were on sale. Eight ounces, regularly $3.68, now on sale for $1.98.

Seemed reasonable, so I took a closer look. Two rows of the little plastic containers were bumping up against their "sell by" date. Needing to be cleared out, a Dominick's clerk had slapped the familiar blue stickers on saying "$2.00 off."

Hmm, that means they'd be paying me two cents to try their seafood salad, doesn't it? I wondered if it would be really awful, but I gambled on a couple. They were pre-packed at some factory and sealed for my safety, as they say. How bad could they be?

I took them home and tried some. It was really quite good! So I went back. There were still plenty of little plastic containers, and I did some quick calculating on how much of this stuff we could eat before we got sick of it. Or before it went bad and we got really sick of it.

I didn't buy them all, but I did buy quite a few more. They were delicious. No one got sick. I spent nothing, and Dominick's paid me two cents for every purchase. And the containers were perfect to store and stack craft items in my basement.

That's what I would call a good bargain.