Saving BIG

Years ago when wholesale warehouses were just getting traction in the direct-to-consumer market I lived with a young couple who eagerly signed up to save big. It was summer, we lived in a small house with no air conditioning, and they came home from the warehouse with a 40 pound bag of oranges.

In the absence of proper refrigeration (of which there was none at the required scale in our house) an owner of 40 pounds of oranges has two choices; peel and eat 24 hours a day for 2 weeks straight, or hastily open an Orange Julius.

What came in the door next was equally astounding... a 5o pound bag of flour. I had rented a room from this couple for a few months and never saw baked goods anywhere near the kitchen. Despite this, they were apparently gearing up to open an in-home bakery business... or to become weevil farmers. I didn't stick around long enough to find out, they needed my room for food storage.

Today I am a warehouse shopping member myself, a status I can claim only by association as it was my wife who signed us up. I'll never forget the first day she came home with shampoo.

Samples are plentiful in warehouse-ville. The cavernous store is a veritable buffet of processed, frozen, and re-heated bites individually containerized in plastic cups or skewered on colorful toothpicks. They are prepared and served by minimally paid retirees with sore feet, their wrinkled and awkwardly gloved hands moving morsels into position almost as fast as hungry shoppers eat them.

I always appear to look on the samples with interest, my face poised with an inquisitive gaze as I approach the table. And when the food bit makes it into my mouth I raise my eyebrows a bit and nod approvingly. I'll even spend a moment studying the box and then ask "where are these?" even though my stomach is already at the next stand. In reality, the elderly lady behind the table who lost her savings in the stock market, who was assigned to Hot Pockets on isle 7 this morning, and who is now sweating behind a toaster oven doesn't give a rat's ass what I think.

Shampoo samples would be useful, but you never see those. It's hard to find a place to rinse between pallets on the warehouse floor. I'd pay money to sit outside the store on free shampoo day and watch the patrons exit. "Look kids! That guy's head looks like an anvil".

The shampoo that came home with my wife was not sampled, but I'll get to that in a minute. The hard part was not getting the dolly's wheels over the lip of our shower basin, it was trying to squeeze into the shower myself the next morning. Thankfully, there was a convenient pump on top... almost certainly a suggestion made by the manufacturer's lawyers. Attempting to wrangle a slippery shampoo barrel (while naked!) to ease out a coin sized dab on one's palm would surely be injurious.

Three days later my wife's hair decided it didn't like the new shampoo. Her hair is special, not only does it have body and shine, it also has opinions. My hair is more guy-like, it says "whatever!" to things like beer, axel grease, and fire. So the shampoo was mine... twenty years worth. I had no idea what to do with the matching barrel of conditioner... though an inflatable kiddie-pool and wrestling came to mind.

Right now, I am working my way through a 60 year supply of women's multi-vitamins. My biggest fear is not that I will grow breasts, but that (given the vitamins are already long expired) my new boobs will arrive already wrinkled and saggy.

If these side effects seem unappealing let me remind you that, per unit, we paid half what we would have spent anywhere else. We saved BIG!

Us and Them

I was walking out of a store last week and got blocked by an enormous, testosterone saturated, mass of teenager holding a booklet in his hand. "You wanna support local high-schoo fu'ball?".

When I was a kid I wanted to play baseball. Circumstances as they were, I was encouraged to pursue more available (and free) offerings through my public school. Elementary schools, of course, do not have athletic programs and so I found myself engaged in music and theatre.

Direction is sometimes hard to change. By the time my classmates and I were old enough for after-school athletics the ones on the field already had ability and experience. It's good to stick with what you know... and so the music/theatre vector I was on took me all the way through high school.

There was never much overlap between the muscle-bound athletic department and the music/theatre group, half of whom were in the closet looking for an expressive outlet. It was an "us and them" mentality and they had it all; popularity, cheerleaders, abs, and most of all... money!

I went on to college, shed my peforming arts background after one semester (though I loved it), and got a science degree. I learned the value of a good education while studying in the shadow of a State University's behemoth, and generously funded, football program.

So I looked at this mountainous son of Andre the Giant who was eclipsing my escape route, and I said, "Perhaps if you were raising money to buy microscopes for your science class I'd oblige you. Do you have any idea how disproportionately football is funded? You don't need money... what you need is a thick Chemistry textbook and a membership in the Glee Club."

That's when he picked me up with one hand and stuffed me into my locker.

Actually, what I really said was "no, thank you" and then walked briskly to my car... with one eye over my shoulder.