Once again, I caught flak for what my wife said was excessive purchases at Costco.
She says buying in bulk is not always the best option.
She’s still upset with me for buying that 40-pound bag of dog food.
I pointed out how much money we saved buying in quantity versus purchasing the smaller sizes. “It’s all about unit pricing,” I tried to explain.
But she said she’d have less difficulty buying my argument if we had a dog.
I maintain I was simply planning ahead, insisting there will come a time we’ll get one.
But she argues that I purchased that dog food in 1990 yet still no dog.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t want one. I believe that day will come, and when it does, we would already have had the dog food if it wasn’t overrun by ants in 2012.
To keep things amicable, I had planned to bring it back for a refund knowing Costco has a liberal return policy. A friend told me he once returned an item almost a year after he actually purchased it.
But on the basis of equity and fair-mindedness, I decided returning something three decades later was probably a stretch.
Not to mention the ants.
Perhaps if I had found the receipt.
But as to her repeated complaints about what she claimed was unrestrained extravagance at Costco, I referred her to the rotisserie chicken I bought for only $4.99, half the price I would have paid for an uncooked chicken at the supermarket.
A portion of that delicious chicken made for a lovely dinner. Accompanying it was a healthy helping of rice, which I didn’t have to purchase since we still had some left from the 50-pound bag I bought in 2007.
My wife had a couple of slices of breast meat, while I enjoyed a leg and thigh.
But that was only the first meal featuring that chicken. On day two, my wife sliced up the rest of the breast, prepared some brown gravy along with a tasty rice casserole, and on day three she turned whatever was left into chicken salad. Then she boiled the bones, added carrots, onions, and a little rice for a delicious chicken soup.
So eight meals for two people over four days on a $4.99 chicken. And she calls me extravagant.
But she says she wasn’t referring to the chicken when she complained about excessiveness. Rather the additional $282 I spent on other items, including a 50-bag carton of Cheetos, a gallon of ketchup, 5 pounds of M&M’s, a jar of cashews and 60 rolls of toilet paper.
That in addition to the 60 rolls we already had.
She argued there was no need to stockpile toilet paper since there’s no longer a shortage, but then she wasn’t the one who once went door-to-door begging neighbors for a spare roll.
She says, if it wasn’t for toilet paper and Cheetos, we’d be able to park the car in the garage.
humor columnist Irv Erdos at [email protected].
