Guilt, Alchohol and Economics

My poor husband has a cold. He used up every last tissue in the house and started in on the napkins, so I went to the store.

The newspaper flyer advertised "buy 10, get $3 instant rebate," so I bought ten boxes in various patterns. And some frozen vegetables, since we were out.

My husband also asked for some whiskey to make a hot toddy to soothe his chills. I priced out the whiskeys and found a sale that met the store brand price. Whether it actually tastes better I don't know, but it looks like it should taste better. I also picked up a store brand vodka. I've heard that if you're going to buy cheap booze, the quality is least noticeable in vodka. And I had a bunch of limes waiting at home for some vodka.

While I was waiting in the liquor department line, I noticed a cart full of bottles marked "Half Price." As you may have noticed, I can't resist a bargain, so I started picking up bottles to see what they were. Most were $30 bottles of wine marked down to $15 which is still not cheap enough to tempt me. But there were a few clear bottles that were obviously not wine. They were in fact vodka.

Okay, mental math time. A one litre bottle is $4. That means two litres is $8. The 1.75 litre bottle at $10.99 costs more for less alcohol. The store brand bottle went back on the shelf.

I started filling up my cart with vodka bottles. The clinking caught the ear of the woman in line ahead of me, and she turned around and took the last two bottles. Then she continued to check out.

The cashier totaled her order: a small bag of groceries, a bottle of wine and my two half-price vodkas. She started counting out money. Counted it again. She seemed confused and I was wondering if the store could legally sell her wine and vodka if she was already inebriated. Do they follow the same laws as bars?

The cashier said "Is that all you have? You don't have enough." She mumbled something and turned to me with big sad eyes. "Can you help?"

I jumped forward, thinking she needed help translating or counting or some such, but she just needed money. I'm afraid my next reaction was "I won't help you buy alcohol," which seemed kind of hypocritical since my cart was loaded with booze. But it can't be right to finance a stranger's binge, can it?

She mumbled some more, pushing the money around on the counter. The cashier asked if she wanted to put some things back, like the vodka or the wine. It's embarrassing to admit, but for a moment I wondered if I would get those last two bottles after all.

Then the store manager came over to consult with the cashier and the woman in line. None too pleased with my reactions during this little drama, I slunk away, checked out in another part of the store, and left with my six bottles of alcohol, ten boxes of tissue and two bags of frozen spinach.

I Go-ot Card-ed!

Bought a bottle of rum at Jewel the other day. The kid at the cash register called for a "Twenty-one" because she wasn't old enough to ring me up. The manager on duty came over. She was about my age, maybe a bit older, and she asked to see my ID.

Now I was wearing my hair loose and I did have a college sweatshirt on, but since I've been legal to drink twice twenty-one and then some, I find it hard to believe that anyone would have difficulty ball-parking my age.

Maybe the manager was just trying to make my day. If so, she did!

Too Many Hurting People

Strictly speaking, this isn't a Grocery Story because it happened at Kohl's department store.

The woman in front of me in the check out line held a fistful of pretty panties like a bouquet of colorful flowers. The checker, a bubbly girl in her early twenties, exclaimed over their dainty frilly-ness and chattered about how much she enjoyed pretty underthings as well.

The woman agreed, but said these were for her daughter at college. "I like to send her little things to let her know I miss her and I'm thinking about her."

Busy with the scanner, the checker's laugh sounded a little artificial. "I'd be happy to know my mother even remembers she has a daughter."

The woman was taken aback. "Well, that happens, I guess..."

"Yeah, some people just shouldn't be mothers. Hey, maybe you could adopt me!"

The checker laughed. The woman laughed. Standing next in line with my purchases, I laughed. But I'm not sure any of us thought it was funny.

A Trend in Sweet Corn?

I've been grocery shopping for frighteningly close to half a century, but only recently have I noticed Sweet Corn Shucking at my local stores.

In the olden days, (say three years ago) you might lift an eyebrow to see even modest peeking at sweet corn in the produce aisle. Only those who were really concerned shoppers might peel back an inch or two of green to check if the corn was fully developed. It was a reluctant defense mechanism due to farmers rushing their products to market before the proper harvest time.

Now however, people wantonly strip their corn right there in the store! Off come all the green leaves and even the silk before the naked ears get bagged it in plastic.

I noticed this disconcerting habit first at Michael's Market where they have an extensive array of vegetables I don't know how to cook, let alone pronounce. Michael's attracts customers with a wide range of ethnicities, many of whom look to be newish to this country. With maybe one driver in the group, whole families of multiple generations come on shopping trips, much like I remember from my own childhood when we had just one car and only my dad had a license.

I shop with efficiency. Certain stores for certain items. Coupons organized by my route through the store. In, out and back home again as quickly as possible. So it really threw a wrench in the works one day when "sweet corn" was on my list and the bin was so mobbed I couldn't even reach an arm in. And I have long arms.

The bin of corn was surrounded by women ruthlessly ripping husks from the corn. Each woman was accompanied by her man who was equipped with a plastic bag to receive the pathetically pale yellow ears, as well as her cart-full of squirming children, and often a grandparent. Green leaves overflowed from a huge garbage can onto the floor and corn silk was flying through the air.

I was a little taken aback, but chalked it up to learning something about different cultures, which is why I go to Michael's Market in the first place. Just a short time later, however, I ran into, quite literally, a big garbage can of corn husks in the Jewel produce aisle.

As always, Jewel's produce section was quiet and sedate. No one was frenziedly denuding the corn, but there it was: a newly-added garbage can filled with green leaves.

Since corn is purchased by the ear, not by weight or volume, I can't understand the need to shuck it before purchasing. Does this only happen in my grocery stores? I'd love to know what this trend's all about.

Not enough of Too Much Information

We were invited to a barbecue. My contribution was to be a pasta salad, and since I was sick of my usual pasta salads, I selected a recipe I hadn't used before. This wasn't your boiled rotini with bottled Italian dressing sort of pasta salad. This one called for tortellini, dijon mustard, sun-dried tomatoes and prosciutto, among other things. Still, I headed to my local Aldi's because they carry prosciutto both chopped and sliced, and I had other groceries to buy.

While I was pulling yogurt and butter from the dairy case, the woman next to me was yakking on her cell phone. Like most folks, I usually tune out those sort of people, trying to preserve the privacy of both of us. But something she said just jumped out at me.

"Well, I told her she shouldn't go live with Papa after she got out of the penitentiary! Now look, she's right back in jail!"

I couldn't help listening after that, but I didn't hear anything else of interest. It made me feel sort of cheated. I mean, if you're going to broadcast that sort of personal information in the grocery store, don't you have an obligation to finish the story? Who's in the penitentiary? Her sister? Her mother? Her daughter? What did she do that put her there? And why was it a bad idea to go live with Papa? "Papa" is such a warm, cuddly name and yet apparently there's something sinister about him.

While I was pondering all this, I heard a noise behind me. Actually, it was less a noise and more of a vibration, barely audible to the human ear, but probably picked up by seismographs.

The deep, low, nearly out of range noise said "We need a loaf of bread." Okay, that's a pretty boring thing to say, but wow! the way he said it. I turned around to see just a dad shopping with his two little girls. A very tall, very black dad with a beyond-Barry-White voice.

The girls didn't seem impressed. I guess they're used to it.

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.

A Halloween Grocery Story

Halloween around the corner reminded me of a grocery story from some years ago. We were invited to a Halloween party by a couple who always throw an impressive shindig. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” was still on TV, and my husband and I were big fans, so we chose the show as our theme.

We took an old suit of Hubby’s, tore it artistically in a couple places and daubed it with “graveyard dirt.” Applied some make-up to give him that “undead” look and for the finishing touch, he bought some nifty vampire canine teeth from a costume shop. They are single teeth that you apply over your own canines. You still have trouble eating salsa and chips, but at least you can talk without sounding like a twelve-year-old with a new retainer.

So he was the vampire. And I would be Buffy. Buffy is a barely 5-foot teenager with blond hair and an athletic body. I am not. I decided to go with the spirit of the thing rather than the major surgery required to look like Sarah Michelle Gellar.

A trip to the thrift store found me a cute blue sweater that looked sort of cheerleadery with the addition of a fake high school name on the front. I made my own little flirty skirt in panels of blue and white, and my daughter just happened to have blue and white pompoms. I put my hair up in a ponytail, wore white socks and tennis shoes and carried a sharpened stake with my pompoms. People would get the idea.

On the way to the Halloween party, we realized that we had no film for the camera. (Remember when “Buffy” was still on TV not everyone in those days had a digital camera!) We stopped at a local grocery store to pick some up.

The vampire pulled up to the door. He would stay outside and keep the car running. I went in, picked out my film, and got in line. A couple guys bought some beer, then it was my turn. The elderly lady rang up my film, took my money, and as she’s handing me the bag she said:

“Good luck at the game tonight, dear!”

Certainly made this thirty-year-old cheerleader’s day!

My First Grocery Story as a Married Woman

We were on our honeymoon in Cancun twenty-odd years ago. Just before the big boom, there was little nightlife yet, but lots of construction, so they turned the water off between 10:00 am and 4:00 pm. That meant no showers. No toilet flushing. An intimate honeymoon indeed, but that’s another story.

We got a bargain on a condo, with a little kitchen we thought would be handy for meals to save us even more cash. We also had a blender which saved us quite a bit on pina coladas.

The condo complex had its own “Groceries Store,” like a little 7/11. We bought some eggs and bread, pineapple juice and coconut milk, and a big bottle of rum.

Do you know how many pina coladas you can make from a 2 litre bottle of rum? The night before we left we had a bacchanalia to finish all the “groceries.” I remember nearly wearing out the blender and chasing little lizards around the palm trees, but that’s a way different story.

One night we decided to make spaghetti for a romantic dinner in our little condo kitchen. They didn’t have bottled spaghetti sauce at the “Groceries Store,” so we attempted to make our own using whatever was on the shelf. We bought some tomato sauce and a little can of oregano. We were young and in love and running the blender at full speed, so it was pretty tasty.

Spaghetti for two doesn’t take much oregano, so we wound up putting the can in our suitcase. For years, that can sat on our shelf in various homes. I know spices don’t keep that long, but it was a nostalgic thing. Whenever I picked up that little jar, I would remember when we bought it on our honeymoon in the “Groceries Store.” It still had the price tag on. It cost us 400 pesos.