Shopping

Fry’s Supermarkets is an Arizona subdivision of Kroger’s. By and large it’s a fairly downscale chain, catering to the (non-union) working class and the immobile. But recently this outfit decided it wanted to take out AJ’s, a ludicrously upscale outfit that had a store in Moon Valley, a district of mixed fortunes (one minute it’s all ritzy and titzy, the next it’s chez pitz). Right on the border of Phoenix (downscale), Scottsdale (mid- to upscale in that part of town), and Paradise Valley (Richistan!), they installed a wildly upscale outlet across the street from a small Whole Foods and within easy driving distance of the offending AJs.

Within weeks, the AJ’s closed.  The Whole Foods has hung on, but it’s no longer the WF of choice. It’s weak. Very weak.

Normally I don’t shop in Fry’s, for these reasons:

1) The one in our neighborhood, now mercifully defunct, was an exceptionally bad corporate citizen, seemingly trashing our area on purpose. The bastards.

2) Fry’s stores in general tend to appear in or very close to working-poor (or even nonworking-poor) neighborhoods, where they exploit the residents’ inability to own cars by jacking prices through the stratosphere. The bastards.

3) The meat’s terrible.

4) The typical store’s ambience is best described as grim.

5) I really, really, REALLY resent it when a huge national chain comes in and drives out local businesses. The bastards.

 This morning, though, I made an exception. Here is what I knew:

a) Ruby the Corgi Pup needed some more of her radically expensive dog food (more about which later).

b) Some branches of Fry’s carry said radically expensive dog food. This can be translated to read “the upscale Fry’s in Paradise Valley probably carries the radically expensive dog food.”

c) I also needed a bottle of contact lens chemicals, not available at a Petsmart (the other outfit in town that carries said radically expensive dog food, other than Whole Foods, which does not carry the totally unorganic, environmentally unfriendly contact lens chemical).

d) I had a doctor’s appointment about six blocks up the road from the invasive Fry’s.

So I decided to swallow my scruples and drop by the Paradise Valley Fry’s on the way back to the Funny Farm, by way of avoiding a lengthy drive into the central city, out of my way and annoyingly time-consuming.

Hence: I surface at the Fry’s at Tatum and Shea.

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They were having an amazing sale. Pile that on top of the fact that this store melds upscale grocery store with Target with Cost Plus/World Market with  Bevmo…and the mind boggles.

Found the dog food: $8 less than I’ve been paying at Whole Foods and PetSmart (the Whole Foods of the dog food world).

Found the contact lens solution. Price: who knows. Didn’t have to drive to a Walgreen’s, park, search, and stand in line at yet another cash register to get it.

Found a Bodum French Press coffeemaker: $10 off the usual $39.99 price. Having been alerted to certain shortcomings by critics at Amazon, I busted open a package, pulled the thing out of the box, and inspected. It did NOT have any plastic parts in the plunger. SOLD!

Found sets of sheer curtains, two to a package, for 50% off. These, I need to replace the sheers purchased two or three years ago at Target and installed to shelter the patio plants from summer’s blasting morning sun. SOLD!

Found squirt bottles in various colors and sizes. CLEANING LADY JOY!  I make my own glass cleaner, which drives CL nuts. This is stored in a Home Depot squirt bottle. Also dilute and store Simple Green: into the HD squirt bottle, difficult to distinguish, except by the solution’s toxic-looking color, from the bottle of clear glass cleaner. And I place dish detergent (slightly diluted) in another HD squirt bottle, utterly indistinguishable from the clear glass cleaner, except by the label inked on with a Sharpie, ink that readily washes off. Cleaning Lady Craziness. To add to that: I keep a bottle of clean, clear water to squirt on the dogs when they get out of hand, also in an HD squirt bottle. Cleaning Lady and Proprietor Craziness.

Purchased a blue bottle for the glass cleaner (heh…Windex, get it?). Purchased a small fist-sized squirt bottle for Dog Squirt. Fifty cents off each of the above.

Grabbed a much-needed medium-sized French canning jar for storage. A dollah-fifty off.

Found some of those flocked coat hangers that keep your slimpsy blouses from sliding off onto the floor. No cents off, but didn’t have to drive way to Hell and gone across town to the Container Store.

Found GE three-way INCANDESCENT light bulbs. Grabbed. Haven’t seen those at HD for awhile. Will buy more (probably lots more) the next time I’m in the vicinity.

Found stainless-steel teaballs, $1.99, in a bulk container. Need. Haven’t seen for a long time, certainly not at that price. Certainly not free of nasty consumer-proof packaging.

Found package of three mesh laundry bags, now needed to do laundry in the HATED high-efficiency goddamn washing machine, for a mere six bucks. Two of these are excellent sizes. One will hold a bra or a couple of pairs of underpants. I guess.

Found REAL LIVE GREEN TOMATOES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

OMG. Paid price of regular tomatoes. GRABBED! Raced home, sliced, dunked in egg, cornmeal, and flour, cooked deliciously in a lake of butter. Ate.

Attained Nirvana.

Or should the title be “Love in the Time of Costco”?

Ever notice how the Costco phenomenon has a lot in common with magical realism? I mean…it LOOKS real. But if you can shake yourself out of the dream and back to reality it’s kinda…weird.

Lately I’ve been working hard to stay away from Costco. Ideally, I’d like to keep the journeys into the Magical Land of Costco down to one a month, thereby cutting the Magical Overspending by a factor of God only knows how much.

Right now, I need (or crave) the following:

• tomatoes with flavor, affordable (i.e., Campari or “cocktail” tomatoes)
• shredded Parmesan cheese, lifetime supply of
• spectacularly delicious baby back ribs
• bottle of cheap but potable white wine
• bag of fingerling potatoes, preferably of the purple  (i.e., higher in nutrients) variety

All of these are available at Costco. In addition, I need, not readily or sanely available at Costco:

• 1 can of anchovies
• a modest number of kalamati-style olives

The olives are also available at Costco, only in a lifetime supply. If I were to go to Safeway, I could buy some in bulk but only in the amount I need for the proposed recipe.

Let us consider what will happen if I go to Costco…

• I will see a gigantic chunk of the Swiss cheese I favor and decide to buy it, on the theory that this will be one fewer thing to tempt me to return to CC in the future
• CC will have size 8 Gloria Vanderbilt jeans in one of the colors I’ve been coveting but that they seem to have forgotten. I will buy at least one pair of jeans, possibly two.
• I will buy a lifetime supply of dog chicken and dog pork.
• Realizing that the cost of hamburger is relatively modest and, especially, realizing that I’d like to avoid as much work as possible by way of making dog food and that if I take Pup off the canned ickum and start feeding her real food I’ll have to triple the current store of dog meat, I will buy a lifetime supply of expensive hamburger to supplement the lifetime supply of  pork and the lifetime supply of chicken thighs.
• I will see a lifetime supply of anchovies and think “hm…this will obviate an annoying trip to the grocery store” and so, even though I do not need a dozen cans of anchovies and will not use them all before the end of the 21st century, I will buy them.
• And so it will go…

If I bought fancy heirloom tomatoes at Whole Foods and scrumptious exotic cheeses and the fingerling potatoes next door at Trader Joe’s and the giant-size cut-rate package of hamburger and the spareribs and the wine at Safeway along with the bulk olives and the Parmesan cheese, I still would not spend as much as I would likely spend in one visit to Costco.

See what I mean about staying out of Costco?

Spent part of the afternoon yesterday finally emptying out the closets, which have accrued old clothes as stale bread accrues blue mold. Threw out a bunch of tired stuff, moved the winter outfits to a closet in the other room, and gathered the summer stuff in the bedroom closet. In doing so, I freed up a vast number of clothes hangers, which before the cleaning frenzy were in short supply.

Huzzah! Now there’s room for more second-hand clothes from My Sister’s Closet! Actually, the other day my friend Joan and I dropped by the  Nordstrom’s Rack outlet. Though neither of us bought anything, I saw several goodies that I’d like to try on. But I suspect my frugal impulses may get in the way.

Here’s the thing: I tend to buy expensive clothes that are well made (or were, back in the day). These last (or used to last) forever and a day. Some of the stuff that closet harbors has been in there since before I was divorced…and that was a good 20 years ago. Matter of fact, as we scribble I’m wearing a shirt that dates back to said era.

The frugality of this strategy is obvious, no?

Well. Except of course if you buy clothes more than once every 20 years…

As time has passed and American clothiery has been shipped offshore, quality has slipped (we could say “plummeted”) to the point where even high-rent shirts, pants, and skirts not only do not last 20 years, they barely last 20 months.

So in amongst the…uhm…classics are any number of latter-day items from Talbot’s, Dillard’s, Chico’s, J.Jill, and of course that old standby Costco. Rags, all of it rags: faded, stretched, shrunken, frayed, and raveled.

But oooh, how can you throw out perfectly fine rags that could be used for…for gardening? And hiking! And housecleaning! And of course for the ever-present house painting!

Throwing this junk out is difficult. Very difficult. Even painful. How can a person get rid of a raggedy old shirt that she could still wear? A lot of raggedy old shirts, for hevinsake!

And therein lie the two problems: the closet is full of perfectly fine superbly made clothing, only slightly out of date, and perfectly fine gardening clothes, albeit a shade on the threadbare side.

Maybe, in an era when only the most unaffordably expensive clothes are made to last anymore, maybe it would actually be more frugal — or at least less crazy — to buy outfits that you have no intention of keeping more than a few months. At the end of every season, throw the damn stuff out.

That seems so wasteful, it frosts my cookies. But you might spend less money — or at least no more — and from season to season you might have cuter clothes. And you’d have to buy fewer coat hangers.

What think you, Dear Reader? Buy expensive clothes and make them last forever? Or buy cheap stuff and churn it every season? Which is smarter? Or, conversely, which is dumber?