A bad play vs. a bad call at the grocery store

I’ve been in a slump lately in terms of my grocery game, but then yesterday at Meijer I was suddenly “feeling it” again, as Jim Renney, the small town Lex Luther of Stephen King‘s latest blockbuster, would say. Everywhere I looked I saw incredible opportunities. Or at least I thought I did. I guess my grocery goggles had come back, but my execution was still rusty, because the two maneuvers where I expected to make a big score didn’t pan out. One turned out to be a bad play on my part, while the other was definitely a bad call. In either case, ordinarily I would say it makes more sense to shrug it off and move on than to ruminate on what might have been. Trouble is, I like to learn something from my mistakes, and while I definitely learned -- or rather, was reminded -- that a coupon on the exterior of a package usually means you’re supposed to use it right then and there instead of on a future shopping trip, I’m still baffled by the two-pack of flavored Cheerios that promised, in big gawdy type, $2 off fruit it never delivered. Definitely a bad call, and I decided to take it up with the officials.

So I called Meijer, who said it was General Mills’ fault, since it was their promotion inside their packaging. And then I called General Mills, who said, essentially, “huh?” The person I spoke with couldn’t seem to track down the promotion I was holding in my hand, and suggested I mail it in so they could take a look at it. I sent digital photos via e-mail instead.

So, will General Mills rule in my favor? I suppose they’ll send me another coupon, hopefully a real one this time. Personally, I see the whole thing as a reminder that when you mess around with coupons, it’s easy to get burned. The best way out of my “slump” is to focus on the fundamentals -- meal planning and tracking my spending -- instead of hoping for a quick coupon score to raise morale. But I’m not too sorry for protesting the bad call, if it gets General Mills to correct a ripoff that might affect other people.

Self-imposed taxes

There are some taxes that have nothing to do with the IRS. In fact, you may not even be aware of them. But they cost you money just the same. See if any of these sound familiar:

The clutter tax -- This term, coined by my husband, has been in our family lexicon about as long as we’ve had kids. (Though we weren’t immune to clutter before, the problem certainly escalated from that point forward.) Basically, it applies anytime you buy something that you already have -- either because you didn‘t remember that you had it, or simply couldn‘t find it. A good example of this, for us, is duct tape. We almost always have a roll somewhere, but it’s usually been appropriated by one of the kids and relocated to some hidden location.

The disorganization tax -- I became aware of this one on Christmas Eve at Wal-Mart, where I was hunting for last-minute stocking stuffers. I have a time-tested formula for filling Christmas stockings, and usually I wrap this task up by November, having found everything I need at garage sales or on clearance. But I’d fallen behind this year, and so there I was, making decisions on the fly. I realized, as I stood in the check-out line, that I was about to be assessed a stiff fine for my lack of preparation.

This tax hits hardest, and therefore most noticeably, on gift-giving occasions like birthdays, Easter and Valentine’s Day. But I wonder if it doesn’t do more overall damage at dinner, which for many people, comes with an automatic lack-of-planning surcharge.

The insecurity tax -- This is another tax I associate with Christmas, but it applies anytime you pay extra because you’re worried about offending someone. There are some people on our gift list, for example, who are thrilled with a $2 book on tape (or CD) from the library sales rack. Other relatives might enjoy the same gift, but because there’s no precedent for secondhand presents at that gathering, I’d feel compelled to bundle the CD-pack with something else, like a shirt.

It can be horrifying to calculate the total cost of all these hidden, self-imposed taxes. But the good news is, most of them can be eliminated with better planning and resolve -- unlike the taxes assessed by the IRS.

Another nominee for the frugal bible

I keep wondering if I should try to wedge MFK Fisher into my frugal bible. She’s not a great fit, because you don’t get the sense she was naturally frugal so much as necessarily frugal during the lean years of the Depression and World War II. (The concluding chapter of her 1942 book, “How to Cook a Wolf,” suggests that readers imagine concocting such recipes as shrimp pate, even though the ingredients were then nearly impossible to find, much less afford. “This therapy, unconscious or deliberate, is known to any prisoner of war or woe,” she wrote.)

I can’t help thinking, though, that Fisher would be an improvement on Job, the rich Old Testament dude forced to suffer in an experiment Satan cooked up and got God to endorse. You can’t blame Job for whining, though he does go on and on about his troubles. Whereas Fisher, at least in her writing, retained her good humor while focusing on how to get through the darkest days without “living like earthworms ... existing as gracefully as possible without many of the things we have always accepted as our due: light, free air, fresh foods, prepared according to our tastes.”

Fisher saw hard times as a good time to espouse philosophies that would be a harder sell in times of plenty. She railed against American white bread, for instance, long before it was fashionable to do so, and criticized the notion that each meal must be “balanced” like a school cafeteria lunch. “Perhaps this war will make it simpler for us to go back to some of the old ways we knew before we came over to this land and made the Big Money,” she wrote.

Human flesh, at $4 a pound

That’s how much it cost me to lose 30 pounds on the Weight Watchers program: Around $120, or $4 a pound. And that’s because I did it in 12 weeks. Judging from what I hear at the meetings, that’s a fairly fast clip, so a lot of people are paying more -- sometimes quite a bit more -- per pound.

I’ve got to say, it’s a dandy program. As someone who’s tried focusing on calories or fat or carbs without much success, I think it makes a lot of sense to factor fiber into an overall equation that the company’s number crunchers have then reduced to a fairly simple points system. (I love the way you can add something to a food to make it less fattening. Just last week, Ben stirred some unprocessed bran into his ice cream and reduced the points value from 8 to 6.)

When it comes right down to it, though, once you get your informational materials, it seems like the primary reason to stick with the program is the weekly weigh-in. And it seems like there ought to be some way to achieve the same effect without paying close to $10 a week to have someone else chart your weight. But it’s not quite that simple. I could probably get my husband or my sister to do it, but then I could also probably talk them out of it if I had a particularly rotten week.

The other factor, for me, is that I feel like I‘m trying harder because I‘m paying to do this. Four dollars a pound. So far, I think it’s been well worth the price.

Blowin’ in the wind

I saw a shopping bag blowing across Main Street in Bluffton yesterday, and it made me wince, because even though I’m still suspicious of Big Business’ attempt to shift packaging costs and pollution guilt to the consumer, I do realize that these bags pose an environmental problem when they’re allowed to roam free like that. And they do, far too often. Blowing bags just aren’t that uncommon a sight.

But why is it that you never see plastic trash-can liners blowing across the street? Because people spend money on them, have a use for them, and perhaps most importantly, have a well-designed box to store them in. A 12-pack ramen noodle box takes care of the storage problem, and many people do use these bags in lieu of commercial wastebasket liners. Is the gimme factor the problem, then? Because the bags are free, they’re perceived to have no value, and thus people don’t treat them the same way they would plastic bags they’ve spent money on?

If that’s the case, maybe Big Business is right to shift the cost of shopping bags to consumers. But I’m still not buying it.

When did Easter become a second Christmas?

When I was a kid, the Easter Bunny confined his efforts to filling your basket. But now, at least in those households where the breadwinners still have good jobs, it seems like the basket has become the springtime equivalent of the Christmas stocking -- just a starting point. Or from the kids’ perspective, maybe it’s more like an afterthought. The good stuff is what spills out onto the table or floor, too big and expensive to be confined to such a quaint container. Checking the basket comes after you’ve examined that shiny new bike or video game system.

I’d been vaguely aware of this trend the past few years, but it came sharply into focus yesterday when it was revealed that our youngest child was grumbling about how “everything we get is suckish” compared to cousins and friends.

Here all this time I thought we were celebrating the arrival of spring with symbolic representations of new life. I can build a case for chocolate bunnies, or even springtime accessories like batting gloves or Frisbees, but they’ve got to fit both an Easter basket and our budget. Which, now that I think about it, does make Easter a lot like Christmas, because at our house Santa still confines his gifts to what he can wedge into a stocking.

A black hole in disguise

If there were a Journal of the American Academy of Clutter-Control Science, I’d feel compelled to file a report on the gravitational pull of that ramen-noodle box that’s been recommissioned as a plastic shopping-bag container.

It looks like an ordinary noodle box. But if you peer through the tear in the plastic cover, you can see a tightly compressed stack of neatly folded plastic shopping bags inside. Outside the container, where the usual laws of clutter physics apply, those bags would explode into an unwieldy mountain of airy nothing that would quickly scatter to the ends of the earth. Instead, they’ve been sucked into a deceptive black hole.

And it wants more. It sits there in the pantry, thrumming, sending out search-party signals that are somehow programmed through my eyeballs, seeking more and more and more. And its finding them: Crumpled plastic bags in the garage, the back of the van, the furnace closet. Only last week I averted my eyes, seemingly blind to their creeping presence. Now, once detected, they have no chance of escape. The awesome appetite of