On a recent grocery shopping journey, I repeatedly got stuck behind a funny woman determined to stretch her dollar, taking her own sweet time doing so. She moved several gallons of milk to get to one that expired a day later and sorted through the discounted meat extensively.
Being a deal hound, I could mostly respect her odd behavior and didn’t get too irritated with how our route through the grocery store kept intersecting. Perhaps this was the future eccentric me in 30 years.
When we got to the eggs, I witnessed an interesting phenomena.
There were already two people at the eggs when we arrived. They picked up their generic packs of Smith’s eggs and went on their way. The funny woman then took her time opening up the 18-packs of eggs, comparing the contents. She actually picked out two smaller eggs from one pack and exchanged them for larger versions in another pack, finally going on her way.
I watched with interest as all three customers, including a clearly value-sensitive shopper, passed over an 18-pack of eggs placed right in the middle of the shelf with one of those discount stickers tagged to the side, marking it down $1.50 from the regular price.
Not one of them even looked at, let alone opened it up to see why it was marked down.
When I got my turn, I opened up this lone pack of eggs to find that it was simply missing a single egg.
$1.50 in exchange for one egg.
$1.50 in exchange for one egg.That’s nearly 60% off the regular price of $2.59 for the pack, meaning I normally pay around $0.14 per egg. I’ll take that deal all day long.
Funny how we have been conditioned to snub “defective” products, yet the prior week when they had marked down the “regular” eggs 20%, there was literally a run on the store and I had to make a second stop at WalMart to get my morning protein source.
I must say I appreciate this consumer mentality. Leaves more tasty eggs for the rest of us.
never thought of trading the eggs around- interesting concept; I dam embarrassed to say though that at one time I bought a 2-piece outfit for my daughter and traded out the bottom for a smaller size, 3T on the top and 2T on the bottom. Now that is low!
I’ve done that at least a few times 🙂
One of my mother’s great joys was cracking open an egg and finding out there were two yolks inside. On the rare occasions that this happened, she would call us all in to the kitchen so we could all witness the event: two yolks in the bowl, yes, from one egg. After the first occurrence, she would do like the lady in your story, and switch out eggs in the carton to ensure all 12 she bought were big ones as they had the best chance of having the double yolk, or so the legend goes.
That is awesome! We also love getting double yolk’ed, but I hadn’t put two and two together with the lady from the store. Now I am going to be the one swapping eggs…apparently she WAS the future eccentric me.