Frugality

I'm not a frugal person. I don't think I've ever been described as cheap or "xiao3 chi4" (in Mandarin). I enjoy a good sale and revel in saving 40% with my Safeway Club card but I'm also all for spending for something we really like or for something important (like our plane tickets over the holidays that Tom's mom thought was too expensive). And I don't think anyone can look at our dining out budget and say that we're cheap. :-) But maybe tonight's trip to Safeway to replenish our empty fridge after vacation takes the cake of frugality.

Valu Pak ground beef was $2.99/lb but they were out. I asked if I could take the last 3 regular packs (also on its own sale for $3.29/lb) and get the Valu Pak price. I said I was happy to buy a Valu Pak amount but there was none left. The meat guy didn't know but I decided to buy them anyway and ask for the 2.99 price at checkout. Safeway's a big company and they've been very reasonable with my questions in the past. Can't hurt to try, right?

So I did.

The checkout girl called over the manager who said that usually they just give me a raincheck but since I got the last of their inventory, she'd give me the 2.99 price. Woohoo! But what was embarassing was:

1. I held up the line. I don't know why manager and checkout girl couldn't just ring up a new price in the register but they couldn't. So checkout girl actually had to pull out her CELL PHONE and use the calculator to recalculate the # lbs times 2.99. This with the manager helping her. Obviously, I apologized to dude behind me for the delay.

2. The discount actually caused me to buy a pack of gum I didn't care to buy. I had a $10 off $50 coupon that I wanted to use in the next 4 days but with my beef discount, my order came out to $48.99, I kid you not. Had to spend an extra buck to save 10.

3. I held up the line even longer. I grabbed my useless pack of Altoids gum to bump my order up to $50 to save another (now net) $8. Manager said I'd have to ring it up separately because checkout girl already approved my original order. Luckily she still gave me the $10 cash back, but it took another minute to ring up the gum separately. By now there's 3 more people in line. I never zipped out of Safeway faster.

4. All for 45 cents. I came home and told Tom the "funny" story. He laughed at me and asked how much difference it made in the end. We did quickie math as I looked at the receipt and my 3 little packs of ground beef and the grand total difference was around 45 cents. I guess in the end I would have still had to buy that extra pack of gum. But this way, I looked like a complete cheapskate to save 45 cents only to have to buy a $2 pack of useless gum to save $10 (or $8).

$2.99/lb seemed much cheaper than $3.29 at the time.

That was the embarassing part. The hilarious part of this whole thing is that when growing up, Tom used to be so embarassed when he'd be grocery shopping with his mom and his mom would bicker over 10 cents at the checkout line. So after I told Tom my story, he could only shake his head in scared disbelief that history was repeating itself right in front of his eyes. At least I haven't scarred Tobey and Eli yet, tonight I was shopping on my own, and I think I was pleasantly assertive but not confrontational tonight. But perhaps if I had heeded my own mom's advice about doing fast math in your head to make sure no one cheats you out of your money, I would have quickly calculated that all the hubbub at the checkout tonight wasn't worth 45 cents and a pack of useless gum.