Bargain Shopping

I will admit that getting stuck behind someone with loads of coupons usually results in some eye rolling, but these days I have a different perspective. With all the talking heads yammering about impending doom, everybody is hunting for bargains. So, this morning when I found myself behind a bargain shopper extraordinaire at Walgreen's I was impressed with her shopping savvy, at least initially. She had a coupon for every item and a couple general coupons. She got a bottle of laundry detergent, two three-packs of Scotch tape and at least three bottles of cough syrup for $.79. That's right seventy-nine cents. SCORE!

But wait, she wanted her "register rewards" (the frequently irrelavant coupons that print out at the end of your transaction at the grocer store and aparently drug stores) but, as the cashier explained you don't get the register rewards if your discounts the price down so low. Made perfect sense to me, I'm not sure she even covered the sales tax. But bargain lady was not satisfied. She became irate and demanded her coupons back, resulting in the need to completely void the transaction. The poor cashier called the manager, rang up my bottle of water, which took about 30 seconds, and I got out as fast as I could. As I was leaving I could hear bargain lady demanding to know why it was taking so long for a manager to come. As it had been less than a minute since the cashier paged the manager, I'm guessing this did not end well.