It started off as your run of the mill grocery shopping trip for me, although that really depends on what your definition of “grocery shopping” is.
This was a late-night run to Bloom.
My wife sent me to get a few things, too much for the 10 items or less line… but at 11:30 pm, that didn’t really matter as by that time at night most stores have that lined closed anyway.
I had a handful of coupons with me that I was fumbling through as I was making my way through the store.
I know, you’re probably thinking: “A guy with coupons? His wife must have sent them with him.”
That she did.
I wouldn’t describe my wife as a “coupon-aholic” but she keeps a very watchful eye on the sales flyers. We get the Sunday newspaper specifically for the coupons. We generally have more coupons than will comfortably fit in her coupon case. And cutting them all and going through all the sales flyers each week is not an hour you want to spend in our house.
We do this because we’re very cost conscious of groceries, and, as any family, we would like to keep our expenses down.
So getting back to the story….
It was a short grocery list. I didn’t have my wife’s coupon book with me. Ordinarily she would try her best to get me to take it and if I knew I was getting a lot of stuff, I would. But I intended to make this a quick trip with minimal purchases.
I’m walking down one of the aisles as another shopper and I come upon each other.
She looks up and down the shelves, scanning. Her glance turns my way, and she smiles.
“You have coupons!,” she exclaims.
“Ummm… yeah, that’s what these things are alright. Ding ding ding. You win the genius of the night award,” I think.
In reality, I responded something like “…well a few anyway. Just enough to cover some of the items on the list my wife sent me to the store with.”
To which she responds, “Well, you mind if I take a look at them to see if I can give you anything better. And you can look at mine too to see if there’s anything you want?”
Admittedly, the first thought out of my mind was “What is this? Some sort of really bizarre ‘show me yours, I’ll show you mine’ game?”
Not to pass up an opportunity to save a buck, I agreed. She took a quick look through mine and found one she replaced with one of hers that gave me an added 15-cents off that item.
I was kind of in a hurry because for some reason I was feeling really awkward about the situation, so I flipped through her binder real quick, didn’t see anything that struck my fancy, and thanked her.
The woman had two 6-inch binders of coupons. And I thought my wife was a little overboard on couponing.
We said our goodbyes, she smiled again, and we pushed our respective buggies our separate ways.
It was creepy. For some reason, I felt like I was cheating on my coupons with another set of coupons.
I shook it off, saying to myself “that was really, really weird.”
It was one of those things that went back in forth in my mind as I drove home thinking “how exactly do I describe this to my wife when I get home without it sounding wrong in some way?”
So I described to her the weird experience – and we both laughed about it. We ended up calling the lady The Coupon Cougar.
She’s out there somewhere. Waiting to make some other guy feel really awkward, I’m sure. If you’re ever in the Bloom in Greer, SC at 11:30 at night, you just may run into her.
No comments:
Post a Comment