$3.67 is just way too much for a box of cereal

Klonie JORDAN

I’m not very good at it and I don’t have the patience for it.

See, my wife is a professional shopper. She can make a day out of buying groceries. She will leave the house at 8 in the morning and I won’t see her again until the sun has gone down.

“I’m going to buy groceries,” she will say, “I’ll be back in a little while.”

That’s “a little while” in dog years. That’s seven minutes for every human minute.

I don’t know why it takes so long to buy groceries but I suspect my wife, the ultimate bargain hunter, might actually be taking items one at a time to the grocery store manager’s office and negotiating prices. I think she walks into that office with a box of cereal, looks the manager in the eye and says something like, “This sticker on this box says $3.67 but WHAT DOES IT REALLY COST? Then she dickers over the price until she gets a few cents off. Then she goes back and finds another item and does the same thing. By the time she’s done, the manager is sweating bullets. He’s loosened that tie and tugging at the collar on his over-starched shirt. He looks like Linda Blair right before her head spun around in “The Exorcist.”

“TAKE IT, JUST TAKE IT,” he screams as my wife stands there shaking her finger in his face because she thinks the asparagus spears are overpriced. “JUST GET OUT OF MY OFFICE. FOR THE LOVE OF RETAILERS EVERYWHERE, PLEASE LEAVE ME ALONE!”

I think it’s gotten to the point where when my wife walks into the grocery store, bag boys run for cover, checkout people duck under the counter, security guards lay their weapons on the floor and take five paces back.

See, they’ve learned that when momma’s looking to buy something, you’d best be nice to her.

Remember that story Jerry Clower used to tell about Marcel Ledbetter, the pulp wood truck driver who stopped at the beer joint to get one of them bellywasher Nehi orange sodas? But he was too young to go inside the beer joint so he politely asked them to hand him one out the door and he would hand them the money for it. But they wouldn’t do that and on top of that they were rude about it. So what did Marcel do? He went to the truck and got his lightweight McCullough chain saw, went back and ripped the door off. “They,” Clower would say, “ GAVE MARCEL THE BEER JOINT .”

I’m not a very aggressive bargain hunter. I’m the kind of guy you can take advantage of. If I find something that looks like it’s underpriced, I’ll actually volunteer to give ’em more money for it. When I walk into a store I might as well have “BIG COMMISSION” stamped on my forehead. Salesmen rush up to me like the swallows rush back to Capistrano.

One of the fears I have when I go shopping with my wife is that she will want to try stuff on. You married guys know what I’m talking about. I’ve seen you in the ladies wear department holding that purse while your wife is in the dressing room. Men everywhere are very aware of the “purse fear factor.”

On Saturday, we went shopping. And on two occasions I wound up holding the purse. One of them was in the women’s wear department at a popular department store. I stood there holding that purse with a whipped puppy look in my eyes. A guy and his wife walked past. He nodded at me as though he understood exactly what I was going through.

“That poor guy,” I heard him say to his wife as they passed by.

“It could be worse,” I said to myself. “I could be the manager at the grocery store.”

(Klonie Jordan is executive editor of The Gaffney Ledger. You can contact him via e-mail at klonie@gaffneyledger.com)