I once had a good friend who mocked me for all the time I spent haunting grocery stores. That’s what happens when you have three kids. You go through so much food you end up taking residence anywhere you can find juice boxes and Go-Gurt.
This weekend, I learned to buck the system by becoming an official member of BJ’s. (As in the wholesale club. What did you think I was talking about?)
After hauling home my trunk full of booty, consisting of an economy-sized box of 48 pop tarts, two 48-oz. jars of peanut butter, a 36-count pudding snack pack, and a 56-oz. tub of mixed nuts, BJ’s reinforced to me a concept I have known all along: that size really does matter.
You see, whenever I’m given the choice, I instinctively grab the supersized version. (I’ll give you a moment to silence the Beevis and Butthead-esque snickering in your head. Because I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one here who lacks maturity. In fact, I’m counting on it.)
Take my calculator, for instance. On the first day of each month, I sit at the kitchen table punching in every item from my checkbook. Each time Doug catches me using it, he hands me a helmet—because, as he’s explained, someone who needs a calculator of such monstrous proportions should probably wear head protection and never take it off.
I’ve been handed many a helmet throughout our marriage.
Then there’s my cell phone—nothing fancy, a Samsung Galaxy S III, which I purchased early this year when I could no longer take the backlash every time I whipped out my flip-top phone in public. For a solid five minutes after my purchase I was socially acceptable—until I went and got a military-style, shock, water, dirt and snow-proof case with full-body screen protector, which immediately transformed it into something clunkier than an Apple II computer circa 1983.
“Your phone’s ringing,” Doug says every time someone calls, as if on cue. “Better grab your helmet.”
And so when I came home and set my BJ’s loot on the table, you can imagine the ridicule that took place.
“Before you say one word, just look how much money I saved on Pop-Tarts. Forty-eight of them—go ahead, count them—for $8.89!”
“You’re actually going to eat forty-eight Pop-Tarts?” he challenged.
“Me? Good God, no. Do you think I’d actually ingest these? I’m going to feed them to the kids.”
You see, one of my most dismal failures as a parent is that I finally gave up on trying to get them to eat healthy lunches. Dinner is another story, where I monitor each nutritious morsel, to ensure none of it gets whipped across the table, hidden in a napkin or fed to a dog. But packing their lunchboxes with salad and quinoa snack cups would be providing a TLC-infused supply of ammo to the next food fight in the school cafeteria. And so Pop-Tarts, Jell-O pudding, Trix yogurt, pretzel sticks with orange blobs of lard (aka, “cheese”), they get.
Doug wasn’t finished with his interrogation. “How many Pop-Tarts do you plan on feeding them?” he prodded.
“I probably throw one in each of their lunchboxes once a week.”
He paused for a moment. Actually, it was a long moment. I could practically see the numbers colliding behind his eyeballs. My husband uses math only when absolutely necessary—and in his mind, defeating me in an argument is one of those absolute necessities.
“Forty-eight Pop Tarts for three kids, once a week means it’s going to take four months to finish that box,” he calculated. “Where are you going to put a box that size for four months? And don’t they start getting stale after a few weeks?”
I’ll admit, I hadn’t thought of any of this stuff. I was so awe-struck by the supersized package that I assumed I was getting a good deal. And yes, I am still talking about Pop-Tarts.
“Maybe we can help eat them,” I suggested.
It was a feasible plan. If I ate three Pop-Tarts for every one I distributed, the kids and I could polish off the box in a month.
And as long as he was going to talk numbers, it was time to bring out the receipt, marked by a hole punched in the corner. (Because astonishingly, even in today’s economy, the guy who stands at the door punching holes in customers’ receipts has still found a way to cling to his job.) I cleared a spot at the kitchen table and settled down with my receipt and dinosaur-sized calculator.
It seems at $8.89 for 48 Pop-Tarts, each one comes down to a steal at $0.19 each. Compare that to a box of 12 at Big Y for $6.99, where each one comes to $0.59. My heart skipped a beat, but that might be because it spied the 2.5 grams of saturated fat per serving on the label. What an amazing value! It was like stuffing my face with 2.3 free ounces of sugar, corn syrup, dextrose, high fructose corn syrup, caramel color and palm oil for every ounce I distribute to my children!
So excited was I with my financial ingenuity that I ran back to Doug to finish our argument, waving the receipt like a victory flag.
Pass me one of them tarts, will you? Hold the helmet.
As I write this, my blood sugar level has crashed to an all-time low, and my nausea has somewhat subsided.
On second thought, I’ll take my helmet on the side.