Grocery Shopping and other Tribulations
Her head snapped up and she growled, “You can say that again. I need an %$*&@# assistant just to keep track of everything I need to know to buy a few groceries.”
What was she talking about? This week at Freddys' the buying public, henceforth noted as ‘we’, have several money saving? options. We have an assortment of items on which we can save $.50 per item if we buy ten of them. We have another category where if we buy 5 we can save @1.00 per item. Then we have some items that are just on sale, as old-fashioned as that concept may be anymore.
In addition to this we have what they call, “Digital Coupons.” These are coupons you can digitally clip on line when looking through the money-saving offers flogged on Freddys’ website.
Mixed into all this and confusing the issue still more is that every other thing in the store is carrying a shelf tag announcing “New Lower Price” which is eye catching, but otherwise mostly meaningless. The big question for this category of course is, lower than what?
Back to the ‘buy 10 and save $.50 per item’ marketing ploy. We find these items all over the store. So, as we navigate the aisles we are throwing into our carts some of these items along with non-sale items, items on which we can save $1.00 if we buy five, and just items we need but that are selling for regular prices. Now the tricky part is that if we end up with less than 10 of the one category, we don’t get the $.50 off on any of them. And if we pick up more than 10 of these items, we don’t get the $.50 off on the additional ones unless our count reaches 20. So, keeping track of how many of these particular items we have in our cart is paramount. The same program applies to the $1.00 off if we buy 5 sale.
And then there is always the calculation of, if I do save $.50 on this item, is it a good buy? Many times, even with the discount it leaves us paying more than this item’s regular price. Invariably, we decide that some of these $.50 off items are not a good buy so we pass, which fouls up our count, hence the need to keep them separated in the cart so we (at least me) can more easily keep track of them.
Now, as we get ready to check out, we find that we do not have 10 of these items, but 8 or maybe 15. So another dilemma. Do we scrounge around the store until we find more $.50 off items to bring our count up to 10, or do we discard some items to bring out count down to 10, or do we again scrounge around the store to take our count from 15 up to 20 items. In either case how much money do we spend on items we don’t need, at least right now, to save $.50 per item.
Now the digital coupons are another stress inducing subject. We’re assuming that between our computers and the Fred Meyer computer there has actually been some conversation. We can’t know this for sure until we check out and maybe not even then.
Our shopping experience up to this point has been such that by the time we get to ‘check-out’ we are so glad just to see daylight, meaning the door to the parking lot, that we are prone to not pay much attention to what the computer totaling our purchases is doing. The thing will list all items at their regular prices, which, if we are paying attention, nearly gives us heart palpitations, but then at the end it lists all the discounts. Unless a person wants to take the time to actually go through the list and compare each discount to some item on which we should have gotten a discount, we are left with hoping that the store is honest, that their computer knows who we are, and will give us all the discounts we have been promised.
Personally, I think that these systems all work most of the time and come out as they should, but then again, who knows?
That’s why, when I’m grocery shopping, I should have someone along with a grocery ad, my list of digital coupons, and a computer to keep track of all this for me. It would be nice if they had some knowledge of first aid, because I move around the store fairly fast and sometimes people just don’t get out of my way in time.
