I can only imagine what all of the people thought at the local Sam’s Club as my sister and I were walking out the door.  It seemed that everyone was staring at us.  As one gentleman put it, “I like rice…I keep some at home.”  That wasn’t creepy.

I imagined announcing to the crowd, “Hey, we LOVE rice but we HATE having to get up to go to the bathroom.”

I was shopping for my team for a food drive and the whole point was to find the biggest bang for our buck, weight wise.  I thought I was clever bringing my own scale since that had seemed to be useful at the regular grocery store.  My wife had another name for it; “weird.”

The best deal I’d found so far was Aldi’s canned carrots on sale at about 47 cents a pound but now I was going to take this to the holy grail of discount stores.  I was going to Sam’s Club and I was dragging my sister with me…because she has a permanently borrowed membership card.

We almost didn’t make it into Sam’s Club with the scale because of the check-in lady.  She wanted to know if it was a return and I made sure to keep walking as I answered her so that I was too far away for her to keep questioning me.  I don’t know if scales are against store policy but I didn’t have the time to deal with her either way.

The scale turned out to be useless.  It worked at the grocery store because I was putting cans of food that were 1-3lbs each on the scale.  At Sam’s club most of the stuff was in 8lb containers.   Turns out that wasn’t a big deal, pretty much everything has a weight on it at Sam’s Club.

We quickly determined it wasn’t anything highly processed, drinkable or fancily packaged.  We were running out of options and out of time.  I needed to be down to almost 30 cents/lb to have a prayer of my team winning the competition.  Finally it became obvious that we’d have to settle for a shot at second.  It wasn’t canned vegetables at 40 cents/lb, it wasn’t canned beans at 38 cents/lb, it was totally massive bags of rice at 35 cents/lb.  As we left with our prize in tow the real reward was the twisted visages of our onlookers.  I’m sure they were thinking, “What the hell is all that rice and a bag of diapers for?”

Sometimes, you just need diapers.