Shopping

Yesterday was one of the most frustrating days I can remember in a long time. Maybe even in forever. Yet, weirdly enough, hours of frustration and annoyance ended up saving me money.

Started out needing a couple gallons of pool acid, a tank of gasoline, and a few minor things at Costco.

Normally I would buy gas at the midtown Costco, which is cheaper than just about anyplace else in town. It’s not a very pleasant place to shop, though, because the store is located in an area infested with drug-addicted transients. Though security patrols the shopping lot and a hulking attendant lurks by the gas pumps, it’s still depressing to have to drive past a park that hosts a campground full of homeless folks, most of them spaced-out druggies or untreated mentally ill. Plus the Costco in Richistan, because it caters to a more affluent buyer, offers a broader and better range of products.

To get the acid at a reasonable price would require a trip to Home Depot on Cave Creek, which is halfway to the Richistan Costco in Paradise Valley, and directly on the way. The HD, however, is way out of the way of the midtown Costco; to avoid having to drive way north and then turn around and drive back south, I’d have to buy the acid at Leslie’s, where it’s massively overpriced. Soooo…. I decided to make the trek north to the Depot, then head directly east to Costco Richistan. This makes for a longish drive but presents a better likelihood of getting the goods I needed at the cheapest price. Except for the gas.

First stop: Home Depot.

Trot into the garden department, where they normally house the pool supplies.

Nope. No acid. No chlorine. No pool stuff. They’ve moved this junk from its usual niche and replaced it with Christmas junk.

I can’t find it in its old place in the garden department. Can’t find it anyplace outside. They’re supposed to store this stuff outside because the combination of acid and chlorine is explosive, and they keep it outside to minimize the potential for catastrophe, should a leak or a moment of stupidity occur.

After much traipsing around, I finally find an employee. “Where’s the pool stuff?”

“It’s up aisle 16. Go all the way to the end and turn right.”

Trudge up aisle 16 to the far north end of the store. Search, search, search, and search some more. No pool supplies.

Fuck it, I think. Costco has a pool section. They may have the stuff.

So I climb back in my car, annoyed, and proceed to the western border of Richistan, whereon lies the upscale Costco.

A few things are needed, notably another bathmat, this one to serve as a nest for the ailing corgi, who had taken to laying on the icy tiles next to the bed. And a package of meat.

While I’m there, I realize that eating steak is now a thing of the past. At $12  a pound for ribeye (not even the prime version! just choice!), a package of beefsteak goes for $50 to $80 and up. Sooo…forget that.

A package of scallops — wild, not farmed — which used to be an extravagance, is “only” $20, but because I only eat four or at the outside five per serving, it will last for weeks. Pick that up.

One of the snack ladies is peddling some smoked salmon treats. These are very tasty, and with the $2 off come-on a package is only $6. Impulse buy: grab.

A rack of lamb is also a decent buy for me, because I cut it into enough pieces to feed me for four meals. $25.

The bath mat is reasonably priced, comparatively speaking: $13.

I spot a red casual sweater, exactly the thing I’ve been looking for the past several weeks. $18.99. Impulse buy: grab.

The checkout lines are endless. The Richerati…I swear, those people are such sh!theads. I guess the way you get to be rich is to cultivate an attitude that lends to, among many charming habits, cutting people off in line. Every jerk in the store has to slam in ahead of me, so I stand there and stand there and stand there and stand there and finally get to the cash register.

The checkout lady racks up all these purchases. I hand over my cash card. She informs me I owe more.

Huh? There’s $180 left on that card. This stuff cannot possibly add up to that much.

“Okay,” say I. “Take off that and that and that,” pointing to the bath mat and the impulse buys.

She doesn’t know how to deduct a purchase. She has to call a manager. He refunds the amounts she’s charged up, about $35 or $40. They inform me that my purchases still exceed the card’s balance.

People are lined up behind me, tapping their toes impatiently, all the way back to the meat department. By now I am SO exasperated, I say, “Fine. Just keep it. Delete the entire purchase and leave the money on my cash card.”

This is still beyond the cashier’s skill level, but the manager has no problem figuring it out.

Furious, I stalk out of the store and drive across the street to the Target. There I buy a bath rug for the dog to nest on but cannot find a pool department. Nor can I find an employee to ask. When I ask the cashier, she doesn’t know what a pool department is, so I figure it’s safe to assume Target doesn’t sell pool acid. 😀

I trudge back into the central city, where I pay way too much for two gallons of pool acid at Leslie’s.

Continue down to the Pore Folks’ Costco, where I get gasoline for 40 cents a gallon (!!!) less than I paid at the QT for enough to get down to the church and back.

Into said down-at-the-heels Costco, whereinat to purchase the things I needed. By now I am truly furious.

On the way down there, it occurs to me that if the two clerks at the Richistan Costco couldn’t figure out how to refund two items, they might not have succeeded in deleting the entire order.

So as soon as I get inside the store, — which fortunately, because no one else enjoys having to brave a parade of drug-addicted bums, either, is almost empty —  I line up at the customer service stand. There I’m told no problem! Yes, there’s $181 remaining on the card.

Now I run around the store and buy the main things I need, less the sweater and the meat and the bath mat and plus a now much-needed $8 bottle of wine. These items came to a grand total of $71. And that left $111 on the cash card, for future purchases.

Say what? Seventy-one bucks? Really? The Costco up in Richistan just told me that those items plus two packages of meat plus a bath mat and a sweater, hold the wine thank you, came to a total in excess of $181.

Whaaa?

Well, I pay the bill and run.

On the way home, I think…that can’t be right!

Either the guy in the slums keyboarded the purchases in wrong, or the lady at the Richistan store did.

When I got home, I entered that $71 in an Excel file and added the things that I did NOT buy at the mid-town Costco but had tried to buy during the aborted trip to the Richistani Costco…and got this:

I don’t think I’m forgetting anything. In other words, the Costco in a fancier part of town tried to charge me something in excess of $181 for $155 worth of goods. Less than that, actually: I didn’t try to buy a bottle of wine at the first Costco. That’s 8 bucks plus tax. Eight dollars from $155 is only $147.

The prices are the same, by and large, from store to store. So the only explanation is that one of the cashiers — probably the one in Richistan — made a mistake.

It was 3:00 by the time I got home. I’d been on the road since before noon, with no lunch and precious little breakfast. And rather little, we might add, to show for all that frustrating, maddening batting around in the nasty traffic.

So. Even though shopping in a more upscale part of town is a slightly less unpleasant experience, I guess I’ll stick to my kind after this…

So this morning I set out to visit Fry’s (a giant supermarket-cum-Target sorta store) and Costco, whereinat to get…

Costco

Pick up new glasses
Reload the cash card with next month’s budget for CC purchases
berries
cheese
melon
rubbing alcohol
possibly a new whiteboard

Fry’s

dog food
chocolate chips
Turtle wax
1 small bath rug
1 long-sleeved shirt, red
$80 in walkin’-around money

Sounds pretty easy, doesn’t it?

The Fry’s is on the way to the Costco.

They do have bath rugs…in eye-popping hideous colors. Okay, I knew it would be hard to get a pale purple (we mean “lavender”) rug in an era when the couleurs du jour are battleship gray, eye-searing white, and crudely produced teal. But…jeez.

Rubbing alcohol: that’s a Costco purchase: I can get two bottles for little more than one would cost at a regular retailer, and since I use the stuff liberally in the making of window and tile cleaner, Costco is the desired vendor.

Chocolate chips: no problem, though they’re running low on the favored fancy varieties because of the holiday.

Shirt in the desired color: not a freakin’ CHANCE! Reference the colors of 2018, above. Ugh.

Turtle wax: nope. Any number of other car polishes, but no Turtle wax. Car polish is not what I want. What I want is effin’ carnauba wax (which is what Turtle wax is) with which to renew the aging surface of my beloved office whiteboard.

Dog food: noooo problem.

We come away with one package of dog food and a bag of bird seed that we happened upon, offered at a price that puts Walmart to shame.

That was it. Yes. One (1) item of the six things we went in there for. SO PISSED WAS I, between not being able to find 99.8 percent of the things I needed and getting behind some broad in the fast-service line who decided, as I pushed my cart up to the cashier’s conveyer belt, that she just had to run all the way  back to the far south wall of the store to pick up something she’d forgotten, THAT I forgot I needed to extract a little cash. So…what we have here is a fuckin’ waste of my time. Of the first water.

And so, away!

Heading catty-corner across the gigantic eight-lane intersection  to the Bed Bath & Beyond, I dodge effing entitled rich people every inch of the way and risk my life to get into the effin’ parking lot.

Into the BB&B, a kind of Magical Mystery Wonderland for the housewife and the homeowner.

Yeah. Yep. They had the desired lavender bath rug: Twenty-six dollah and change. Add the tax (10% here in lovely uptown Arizona) and it would come to something over $30.

For a shower mat.

Don’t think so, White Folks.

Movin’ on.

At Costco I retrieved the new Rx shades — having prepaid, it was just a matter of asking. BUT…contrary to past practice, staff there refused to reload my cash cards at the service desk. They instruct me to go through one of the checkout lines to get that done.

You understand: the parking lot is SO JAMMED that I had to park in the Penney’s lot to deposit my car and then hike hundreds of yards to get into the goddamn Costco. This means the lines at the checkout stands are halfway back to the meat department.

“Thank you,” say I. “I’ll do my shopping someplace else.”

Goddamnit.

So I figure the Home Depot on the way back toward the ‘Hood will have the carnauba wax. And the Walmart will have the rubbing alcohol. These are the only two sorta urgent items on the list. (I really, really do want to repair and resuscitate the beloved whiteboard!)

Cruising into the HD parking lot (some miles — read, “quite a few miles, in the context of a city”) — I’m reminded that an Auto Zone resides there. Hot dayum!

Park, go inside. I know they have Turtle wax there (I’ve bought Turtle wax at auto stores before), but of course can’t find it. The two (count’em, two) staffers are occupied at the customer service/checkout desk, serving (if you can imagine!) customers. The guy in front of me is trying to buy and install a spark plug, but he has a little problem: he knows NOTHING about spark plugs. The CSR is trying to instruct him, right down to showing him how to apply a pair of pliers.

Oh. Dear. God.

I wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and finally break one of the two staff folks loose. This person instantaneously produces the desired can of Turtle wax, giving me an escape from a frustrating expedition across the parking lot at the Home Depot.

Filled with great joy, I proceed to the Walmart.

Searching for the rubbing alcohol, I discover — did you know this??? — that Walmart’s pharmacy shuts down over the lunch hour on weekdays.

Follows, doesn’t it?

Their clientele in that hardscrabble neighborhood includes not just the usual crew of welfare, Medicare, and Medicaid recipients, but a fair number of actual working stiffs. You know: the sort of folks whose jobs require them to freaking BE THERE to collect their piddling hourly pay. Which in Arizona, a right-to-work-for-nothing state, you may be sure is piddling. Right. This requires them to do their shopping for prescriptions during the lunch hour or — their only choice, if the shop at Walmart — after a long day’s work.

Not that it mattered to me. It was just a subject of astonishment.

Moving on: I do find the rubbing alcohol, very cheap. Very pleased. And over on the other side of the store, I find a different variant of alcohol, which as you may have surmised by now, I also purchased.

Bogle. Best cheap wine on the market.

Holeeeeee shit.

So now I’ve blown the whole goddamn morning, I’m half-starved, and I’ve accomplished almost nothing of the chores I set out to accomplish.

Since that was how my day had gone, can you guess what happened next?

No, I did NOT crash any of my fellow homicidal drivers on the way home, or run over any of the locals’ small children as the little creatures played in the street. For that we may be grateful to God and to ingrained suspicion.

Now I get home and haul the junk out of the car and…and…find Cassie the Corgi. One of her hind feet is encased in petrified dog shit, cemented with a skiff of quarter-minus.

W

T

F

??????????

This, I did not see before I left home. But since she couldn’t have gotten outside to embellish her new boot with gravel while I was gone, she must have accomplished it before I left, and I must not have noticed.

My poor little dog.

This stuff has turned to concrete. But that has not stopped her from pissing all over the house. Luckily, she’s confined her pissing to the large incontinence mats I’ve thrown down in her favorite pissoires and shittoires. So it’s fairly easy to pick up. Damn good thing I acquired another Lifetime Supply of the things at Walmart yesterday.

I cannot wash or scrape said concrete off her little foot and hind end.

So I have to find a large cap of a large jar — thank goodness for Little Old Lady habits that do not allow one to throw away a container, no matter how much space it occupies — fill it with warm water spiked with Dawn, and force her to sit still long enough to soak the stuff off her foot. This is a trick, but fortunately (??) she’s too ill to put up much of a fight. Manage to soak and scrub her more or less clean. Fill up the garbage cans with incontinence mats and brown wet paper towels. Feel very, very happy for Bogle Vineyards.

Get onto Amazon and look up purple bath mats. And by God, there it is! Yeah. There it is. For about 1/3 the price Bed Bath & Beyond expects to collect.

How do these stores stay in business at all? Even if I had to pay for the delivery (which I do not), it would still come to less than BB&B was charging. And it’s exactly what I want. Not approximately what I want.

Yeah.

And that’s how my day has gone.

Yours?