August 3, 2018
Dear Everyone:
I went shopping
at Costco this week. Talk
about taking your life into your own hands!
The Costco store
near me is much smaller than the one in
Concord, where “Jeannie” used to
get her prescription medications.
That one is so large you should always carry extra food and water
in the parking lot. Not the
store. They’ll be happy to
sell you food, etc., inside the store.
But the parking lot is larger than some fairgrounds.
Nevertheless, we could almost never find a parking space within
(excuse the phrase) “walking distance”.
The “smaller” one
in Danville, where I sometimes shop, actually “shares” parking with
another store. So the first
challenge is to find parking.
Around the
Year-End (used to be called “Christmas”) Holidays,
people would even park across the street, which technically is also in
another city, and sprint across.
The
license
plates on my car identify me as authorized to park in one of the many,
many “handicapped” parking spaces near the entrance.
Alas, a lot of other people are equally authorized.
There is typically very little chance of getting into one of the
prized “blue spaces”.
Nevertheless, I found a parking space less than half a
football field
away and counted myself fortunate.
Once I had
trudged to the gigantic entryway, I wrestled a shopping cart, only
slightly smaller than my first car, away from the legions parked in
queues outside the entrance.
Dodging frantically-impatient shoppers with equally large carts, I made
my way to the far right corner.
I was there to
buy Kleenexes.
There’s a
cube-shaped box of Kleenexes in the kitchen.
And one in each bathroom.
And one in the living room.
And two in the master bedroom.
And they all seem to run out simultaneously.
I don’t pretend to know why.
Maybe it’s a union thing.
Like the International Union of Facial Tissues (IUOFT), local
501.
My local grocery
store carries the kind I like, extra soft and multilayered.
They even have a “discount” special.
I can buy a set of four (4) boxes together for $7.99, plus sales
tax, of course. That works
out to an average of $2.00 per box, not counting the quarter of one
cent, which is really too little to bother with.
But I can buy the
exact same cube-boxes at Costco in a 12-pack for $16.99, which works out
to $1.4158333 per box. You
can see where this is going, can’t you?
That’s a savings of $0.58 per cube.
Multiplied by the six boxes in the household, we’re talking about
saving $3.48!
And I replace all
those boxes roughly five times per year, assuming I don’t catch a cold
and actually need to use more Kleenexes than usual.
That’s an annual savings of $17.40.
So how much does it cost to be a Costco Member?
That would be $60 per year.
Not exactly a sterling
Return On Investment (ROI), is it?
In one year, I’m $42.60 in the hole.
Of course,
Kleenex is not the only thing I buy at Costco.
I can get a very good discount on “Jeannie”’s
antihistamine.
And an even better one on flea-and-tick medicine for her two
cats. Actually, the one who
gets the best ROI is “Jeannie”, since I pay for the medication for her
whole household.
Years ago, when
it was “Jeannie” who was paying for a Costco Membership that our mother
shared in, Mother would go to Costco nearly every week, even though she
was only shopping for herself and our Dad.
Every few weeks, she would buy a sixty-pound bag of “Atta
Boy!” dry dogfood at Costco, drag it home and get a neighbor to help
her pull it out of the car trunk and drop it on the garage floor.
They didn’t have a dog.
Each evening, she
would fill an old wooden bowl with the dog kibble and place it out on
the deck outside the kitchen.
Each evening, the neighborhood
raccoons would come up from the
river, waddle across the lawn up onto the deck, and eat the dogfood.
Seriously.
These were the most well-mannered raccoons you could ever hope to
meet. They never got into
the garbage cans. Never
broke into the garage where the giant bag of kibble was kept.
They had a reliable source of food right on the deck.
And they knew a good deal when they had it.
Occasionally,
when Mother would forget to set out the food in the evening, they would
congregate outside the patio door, peering in plaintively, until she
remembered and rectified the situation.
Like I said, very well-behaved raccoons.
Ultimately, the
time came when Mother had to move from the three-bedroom house to a
one-bedroom apartment at Mary’s Woods.
Her friends helped her set up a
garage sale to get rid of a lot
of stuff. One neighbor
seemed far more interested in the house and the back yard, with its
spectacular view of the river, than he was in any “gently-used”
golf
clubs. In fact, he arranged
to buy the house before it ever went on the market.
Mother is the
only person I know of who could hold a garage sale and wind up selling
the garage. And the house to
which it was attached.
I have no idea
what became of the raccoons.
Love, as always,
Pete
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