Not So Funyun

We made a trip to Sam's Club yesterday, two initiates into the highgarglorum of big box wonderstores. Dan got us a membership when he saw the price of butter. We go through a lot of butter, flour, and eggs with our home baking business, Sunflour. The portal to bulk buying opened wide, and swallowed us.

It's way too easy to lose your favorite human in a big box superstore, with racks stacked almost to ceiling height with Pampers and Stove Top stuffing. While my interest was in produce, Dan was a bumblebee among, where was he now, sushi? Entertaining crackers? After losing him twice, I suggested we explore every aisle. We needed a tactic: Know the layout. Stay focused. A list was imperative for shopping here. As are your own bags, which we learned the hard way.

Produce was large quantities of white grapes that looked as if they were pumped full of steroids, and hefty sacks of untrustworthy, swarthy looking lettuces. The mushrooms looked fine, as did some bags of apples, and asparagus.

We wandered the entire store filled with seven foot televisions, Christmas gaud, fat shiny tins of holiday cookies made with coconut oils (I wanted some but no), and enough office supplies for several large corporations. The savings on frozen foods, if you have a large family, is significant. It makes it worth shopping there on the regular. But we are not a large family, so while it's impressive I can walk out of the store with four 16 oz. pouches of frozen broccoli for 6.48, I don't have the space to spare for that much broccoli at once.

 I did get three 5 ct. packs of banker's boxes for 2.71 each that will help me organize the prop room, and a couple of new toilet brushes that came with a warranty I passed on at the checkout.

The checkout attendants took everything out of our cart for us, and then put it back in, unbagged, so we were left to our own devices to pack and unpack a car full of hodgepodge -- 90 ct. flats of eggs, flaps of cheese, banker's boxes, butter. On the way out of the store, another attendant scanned our receipt and a few items in our cart to make sure they matched. No stealing from the Waltons! Then we were on our way to swearing the kitchen walls blue as we crammed an inflated bag of tortilla chips into our tiny pantry. 

On the wall above the checkout scanners was a quote from Helen Walton that rang up as hollow as a 9.25 oz. bag of Funyuns: "It's not what you gather, but what you scatter that tells what kind of life you lived."