CSotD: Teaching your grandmother to save money on eggs
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Gil offers his mother some important consumer advice. Charmingly naive coming from a kid, really annoying coming from your local TV station's news team.
Not that the reporter usually assigned to this one is a whole lot older or more worldly than your eight-year-old.
We've got a new Hannaford grocery store in town and it's best, most welcome innovation is a wait-in-line-to-get-in-line system at the cash registers, where you all line up in one place for the next available checker rather than guessing and getting behind
A. the person with the Bulgarian traveler's checks;
B. the person who has mistaken the grocery store for a casino and wants to spend 20 minutes or so playing lottery games;
C. the Accountant, who not only fills out the check by hand — and waits for a final total before filling in the name of the store or signing it — but then has to balance the checkbook before gathering up her paperwork and clearing the hell off; or
D. The Coupon Queen, who sorts through a voluminous file of coupons to make sure each can of salt, fat, high-fructose corn syrup and artificial flavorings has its own coupon. Her satisfaction comes not in feeding her family but in seeing the size of her write-off — she seems convinced that, if the number is large enough, Bob Barker is going to appear and invite her to play the Showcase. (Yes, I know, but it's her fantasy and Drew Carey isn't in it. Is Drew Carey in anybody's fantasy?)
Calvin Trillin writes of a common economic fallacy, which is that, if you buy something that normally costs $50 but is marked down to $30, you now have $20 to spend on something else. This is sound thinking except for the fact that you wouldn't have bought the thing at all if it hadn't been marked down and, even at $30, it wasn't in your budget to begin with.
But, hey.
I don't have a categorical hatred for coupons, and I will use them in two cases:
1. To buy something I would have bought anyway. The problem with this is that the vast majority of coupons are for over-processed crap. They take 35 cents off the price of a box of Hamburger Helper and you take 20% off your life span by eating it.
Then again, most cleaning supplies qualify as over-processed crap, as do some health things like mouthwash, which brings us to
2. To upgrade so that, for what I have in the budget, I'm getting a higher grade of over-processed crap. This requires that you exercise some judgement: I'm not sure Pine Sol is any better than the store brand, but wotthehell. On the other hand, if the coupon is for Old Spice, I don't care if it's free. Just because I'm a grandfather, that doesn't mean I want to smell like one.
For my part, I do better on discounts than on coupons, because I really don't buy a lot of over-processed crap to begin with, and basic foodstuffs are more apt to be discounted than to have coupons.
So, if they're offering a good price on oranges, that becomes the fruit I buy that week. (This, by the way, is a really good time to buy corned beef, if you can take the sodium surge. I love the stuff, but will admit it more than verges on being over-processed crap without a coupon.)
I'll even hit Shaw's on a Monday simply because that's the main day that they mark down meat. Shaw's also has marked down vegetables, though it's not worth a separate trip. But if you can pick up a better cut of meat for the same price as the shoe leather you normally buy and can cook it up with red and yellow peppers at a green pepper price, that's worthwhile, as long as you didn't drive across down at $3.78 a gallon to save all that money. And do it tonight, because those peppers aren't gonna make it much longer.
Meanwhile, this whole "couponing" thing falls under the general category of "Pull The Other One."
In this economy, those of us who are struggling are getting it from two sides: Our Yuppie friends want us to save the world by going to the Farmer's Market and spending five bucks for a bunch of carrots ("Oooh, and if they run out of artisan bread, let you buy cake!"), while the chipper little corporate stooge on the TV news tells us that, if we really knew how to use coupons, our groceries would be free, and here's an obsessive person on a pre-recorded canned interview from Godknowswhere, Inc., who will tell us how to do just that.
Like I said, it's kind of cute coming from an eight year old.
For the rest, well, there's an old expression about teaching your grandmother to suck eggs, which sounds a lot more vulgar than it is, but nowhere near as vulgar as my reaction to being told how important it is to use coupons.
Meanwhile, in an only-slightly-more-fashionable part of town:
I hope anyone who comes here also visits Cul-de-Sac regularly, but, in case you've been napping, it's Mo Willems week and the hits just keep on coming. I certainly wish Richard Thompson the best with his treatment and can't wait for him to resume his place at the drawing board, but his guest artists have been doing a great job, and I think Willems brings just the right touch of inspired lunacy to the strip today.
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