Samir Shukla
By Samir Shukla
There we were at one of those behemoth membership shopping clubs. You know those giant stores that take up three football fields. Half marathons could be organized to run in their lanes. It’s where you can pick up a shovel in one aisle and walk over to the next aisle and grab a gallon of milk.
Ah, so this particularly popular proprietor of prodigious products shall remain nameless, but you know which one I’m talking about. There are other such stores, but this one seems downright popular with Desis. I think half of their business comes from folks of Indian heritage.
Recognizing this, these mega marts have started carrying pani puris, pickles, pendas, and poha. Not necessarily in that order. Soon enough there will be a paan parlor there. On any given day there will be people running around with shopping carts overflowing with oversized items. Sometimes even two carts. If you go on a weekend, have someone get in line while you shop so by the time your turn comes, it will be quicker to get to the cashier with your overly filled cart.
I feel they should just open the doors to the 18 wheelers that deliver the goods to these stores and let people have at it. Why bother spending effort bringing things into the store. Drop that 200-piece toilet paper package right into the trunk.
These stores also have their own gas stations, of course. Yes, with some luck there will only be a few dozen cars in front of you lined up to buy gas at any given hour. Sure, gas is a bit cheaper, but you lose some of the benefit while the engine is idling waiting your turn.
The idea is that it may be cheaper to shop at these giant membership clubs. That is an admirable quest, but in my experience any grocery store will give you deals on any given day – via clearance items, many buy one get one free deals, sometimes buy two get three free deals, along with weekly specials and lots of in-house coupons. Don’t forget the time saved when you can pop into a grocery store and quickly pick up an item or two. Heck, many items are now competitively priced even at convenience stores. Time is money.
Frugality is built into our DNA. It is a worthy endeavor, up to a certain point. There’s a juncture where saving money becomes secondary and madness kicks in. There is a certain point where the time spent running around huge stores, in lines, membership fees, buying mega packs of everything, that the savings begin to be questioned. Yeah, we are generally frugal people. Our parents were more in tune with saving money than we are. Their parents were even more cost conscious. It was out of sheer necessity. The world was different back then.
We pride ourselves on saving a couple of bucks and getting the best deals we can find pretty much on everything.
Our children and the incoming generations may be different. Ok. They are different. Sure, they like to save money, but they are also all about experiencing life and all its offerings. Lots of hearts and likes and LOLs included. That’s cool. That’s their thing.
We endeavor to make the next generation’s lives better with more opportunities than our parents or we had. We have many more options and choices than our parents did. It’s a natural progression. We live vicariously through the happiness of our children.
The other day I found a 20-year-old coupon for a Mexican restaurant I had cut out from the newspaper I used to subscribe to stuffed in a drawer. Ahhh, the forgotten joys of coupon clipping. Frugality can be fun. Or is frugality the death of fun?
So back to the mega mart. I’m weaving through the heavy traffic in the store, trying to navigate my cart through the throngs of other carts being pushed around. I grabbed a sack of granola, and I mean a sack. I think that thing was 25 pounds. I braced my back as I lifted it and placed it into the cart.
The granola our daughter recommended and wanted wasn’t available there. Ok, I thought. I’ll grab that one at one of the nearby grocery stores later.
That was the last thing on the list, so it was now off to the checkout lines that put the lines at the rides in Disney World to shame.
On the way home, I popped into a grocery store and found the bag of granola our daughter had texted about. Let me check the price tag. Whoa. The little bag in a beautiful package with lots of health benefit describers could have been at home displayed in a boutique on Park Ave. in NYC. This bag looked like an ant sitting next to the titanic sized sack of granola from the mega mart in the trunk. It’s price per ounce reflected its royalty over its modest, larger cousin.
The generational gap of the ways of experiencing life could be studied in history classes. Necessity vs experience. Cheap beer vs top shelf cocktails. Sacks of food vs boutique bags of food. It’s a wonderful life. But who knew there was such a thing as designer granola?
Samir Shukla is the Editor of Saathee Magazine
Contact: samir@saathee.com
X: @ShuklaWrites
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