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.