I don't believe in fighting over food...especially jars of spaghetti sauce. I'm definitely a pacificist when it comes to verbally assaulting someone over a $.69 jar of sauce that quite frankly, I don't think tastes all that great. But there I was...at our local Smith's grocery store at 5:55 a.m. watching women act like rabid dogs fighting over a pallet of sauce. It started innocently enough....At presidency meeting last week, my good friend turns to me and says, "Hey, did you hear about the deal Smith's is having on spaghetti sauce?" I replied with, "You mean that grocery store that smells like poop and has weevils in all its food?" She didn't miss a beat. "Yeah, that one. They're having this deal where you can get Prego spaghetti sauce for $.69 a jar. [This was the part where she listed all the women from the neighborhood that she had seen there.] Wanna go?" I knew immediately that I needed to be suspicious. "What does this entail?" Turns out you had to be standing at the doors at 6:00 a.m. to get a shot at the one measley pallet they put out. I seriously don't know what possessed me but I agreed to get up and go with her the next morning.
So at 5:45 a.m. my friend pulls up in her van. I jump in and tell her that I will never, ever do this ever again and she better appreciate the early morning company because I don't even like my children well enough to get up at this hour. We drive to the poop-infested grocery store and there are a bunch of cars in the parking lot. Several women have approached the first set of electric, sliding doors and someone says, "Hey these doors are locked! AND THERE ARE WOMEN IN THERE SHOPPING!" Some light door pounding ensues until a heavy-set woman at the other set of doors says, "Over here. I think I can slide them open." And she proceeds to insert her chubby fingers into the doors and pry them open. We all go rushing in and I feel a little bit like a salmon caught in an uphill swim. By the time we reach the forklift, the spaghetti sauce is gone and the whining starts. "Who let those women in? Why don't they limit the number of cases you can get? The store isn't supposed to open until 6:00 a.m." whine, whine, whine, blah, blah, blah. Meanwhile, the guilty culprits are standing in a big long line at the checkout stand with baseball caps pulled over their greedy little faces trying to bury their noses in check stand magazines. ONE lone checkout lady is trying to handle the 6:00 a.m stampede and no one is going anywhere. My friend immediately pulls out her hefty wad of coupons and starts shopping the Campbell's soup deal. I wander around a little, check out the Hamburger Helper, look at the darling new Kleenex boxes, and finally push my empty cart over to the eternal checkout line to save a place for my friend and get caught up on the latest celebrity news in People magazine. I just couldn't bring myself to buy anything. I wasn't going to be "one of them". I was going to stand tall and proud as the "lone wolf" of shopping deals. I read an entire magazine by the time we got up to pay and by then they had 2 clueless checkout clerks who spent more time arguing over how to scan all the stuff then they actually spent scanning.
I got home around 7:00 a.m. and I felt dirty. Not only had I entered an establishment that I swore I would never enter, but I had been a part of some serious nastiness of those jars of spaghetti sauce. The funny thing is...since last week, I've had at least 3 conversations with different people who have brought up the Prego sauce fiasco and all the trauma they went through trying to get their rightful case of sauce. I told my husband they might need to call in the trauma unit. It is going to take a while for this little town to heal.
As for me, I'm going to continue buying my food at regular price, sleeping in until 7:00 a.m. and eating my spaghetti without the stinking sauce.
P.S. Just a weird side note...when I did a google search for "spaghetti sauce", the following image showed up:
6 comments:
That is a hilarious story. I can't believe you got up that early for spaghetti sauce. Seriously. WHO DOES THAT?!
All that for Prego? Wow.
This is why I don't live in Utah. No one in Oregon would get up at 5 AM for a grocery deal. Your description was absolutely hilarious though. I HATE those kind of stampedes. I was once involved in one at Provo Towne Centre mall - we were trying to get free tickets for the rock concerts they were having during the Olympics at the medals plaza. It was so insane. I actually felt dirty, like I had sinned or something. You could cut the feelings of greed and selfishness with a knife! And we ended up not getting anything after all of that.
I'm still trying to make sense of the picture...and I hate coupons. Call me snobby, I shop conveniently and that means the most I'll do is glance between brands and see which is cheaper (unless of course its waffles or parmesan cheese, then I simply have to buy name brand...naturally.)
Emma Jo, does the Gap make waffles?
Anyways, Cousin A, I admire that you did not participate in the rush. It must have taken a lot of courage to do the right thing in the face of all that peer pressure. Also, your friends are crazy (not all of them, just the spaghetti ones).
In reference to your picture, did you know that the words "spaghetti sauce" in Italian mean "to kiss a girl while wearing a dog muzzle"? That's why so many American get in trouble when the visit Italy.
I know I am way late commenting on this post, but did you know that on one particular day-after-Thanksgiving, Nate and I arrived at 5 a.m. for the Star Wars sale at Toys R' Us. We, of course, were buying the Star Wars stuff for him, no needy children anywhere. Would you know that a little boy grabbed the one remaining item that Nate wanted before he did, so we spent the next half hour stalking the kid, waiting for him to change his mind and drop the thing. (We heard his dad say he could have one thing and it was way to early in the shopping experience for this to be the one thing...) We did eventually get it...talk about feeling dirty!
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