Tag Archives: rice

400lbs of rice and a bag of diapers

I can only imagine what all of the people thought at the local Sam’s Club as my sister and I were walking out the door.  It seemed that everyone was staring at us.  As one gentleman put it, “I like rice…I keep some at home.”  That wasn’t creepy.

I imagined announcing to the crowd, “Hey, we LOVE rice but we HATE having to get up to go to the bathroom.”

I was shopping for my team for a food drive and the whole point was to find the biggest bang for our buck, weight wise.  I thought I was clever bringing my own scale since that had seemed to be useful at the regular grocery store.  My wife had another name for it; “weird.”

The best deal I’d found so far was Aldi’s canned carrots on sale at about 47 cents a pound but now I was going to take this to the holy grail of discount stores.  I was going to Sam’s Club and I was dragging my sister with me…because she has a permanently borrowed membership card.

We almost didn’t make it into Sam’s Club with the scale because of the check-in lady.  She wanted to know if it was a return and I made sure to keep walking as I answered her so that I was too far away for her to keep questioning me.  I don’t know if scales are against store policy but I didn’t have the time to deal with her either way.

The scale turned out to be useless.  It worked at the grocery store because I was putting cans of food that were 1-3lbs each on the scale.  At Sam’s club most of the stuff was in 8lb containers.   Turns out that wasn’t a big deal, pretty much everything has a weight on it at Sam’s Club.

"Maybe they just swim around in it like Scrooge McDuck?"
“Maybe they just swim around in it  while wearing the diapers like Scrooge McDuck?”

We quickly determined it wasn’t anything highly processed, drinkable or fancily packaged.  We were running out of options and out of time.  I needed to be down to almost 30 cents/lb to have a prayer of my team winning the competition.  Finally it became obvious that we’d have to settle for a shot at second.  It wasn’t canned vegetables at 40 cents/lb, it wasn’t canned beans at 38 cents/lb, it was totally massive bags of rice at 35 cents/lb.  As we left with our prize in tow the real reward was the twisted visages of our onlookers.  I’m sure they were thinking, “What the hell is all that rice and a bag of diapers for?”

 

 

Sometimes, you just need diapers.