Highway Robbery

Yesterday morning I had to make my daughters PB&J with one regular slice of bread and a crust (gasp). We were out of her awful white bread. I wondered if I'd her complaints after school or worse yet find a sandwich with just one bite out of it when I emptied here lunch bag this morning. Neither happened -maybe hiding the crust side face down in her sandwich container worked? Don't doubt the devious mind of a Mom in the morning.

I didn't get out all day so when I picked her up from school I needed to get bread. There is a cute little restaurant/store right near here school so I stopped in to get bread. No bread. They don't sell it. They had canned drinks and snacks but didn't stock bread. So I had to take a slight detour to the local convenience/gas stop. You know the kind, shelves stocked with beer of every flavor, coolers full of pop, aisles of chips and snacks, and oh yes, one little shelf with bread on it.

Have you ever noticed that in this kind of store, most of the grocery items don't have prices on them? They're not fools. They know that once you mosey up to the cash register and they ring it up they've just about got you. How many of us have the balls to say the thoughts racing through our mind at that point, such things as "highway robbery", "scandalous" or "what a rip-off"? Not me. I dutifully shelled out my $2.79 for my loaf of white bread. You better believe my frugal mind was calculating how much fuel I had saved by not driving to Walmart (I figured it to be about $1.00) and that my time was worth ever so much, that it certainly justified not spending the additional 25 minutes it would have taken to drive there, park and get the bread.

Oh what a price we pay for convenience. I just can't believe how many people make these kind of stores a regular in their day - the place was packed. Can you imagine how much money these people waste each week? And then they complain about not being able to make ends meet?

You better believe I'm buying two loaves of bread when I do my groceries this week, I'm going to keep a spare loaf in the freezer!

And just for the record, here's what a $2.79 loaf of bread looks like!