I was recently in Pearl Street Market buying some ingredients to make something for lunch later in the day. It was around 7:30 a.m., and I wasn’t feeling or looking amazing. I also wasn’t thrilled about the idea of running into someone I knew at that moment, so I was kind of just grabbing items quickly, a little haphazardly and perilously oblivious to price, amount of calories, ingredients, etc.
I went up to the cash register with four items — one of which was a Diet Coke, cost: $1.59, so that barely counts — and to my horror and shock, I had managed to drop $30.56. Come again?
I paused for a second, and, thinking logically for about the third time in my life, I decided that before I called out the guy ringing me up, I would maybe take a look at the items’ price tags to see if I had legitimate grounds to protest. Then when I confirmed there had been a mistake — and I’m no mathematician, but I was pretty confident I was right on this one — I would open with something to the effect of: “Um, excuse me, sir, but this here … is highway robbery.”
Well, turns out, I was wrong. Not about the highway robbery, but about the error in price.
In hindsight, not too surprising because I’m usually wrong about most things. What I thought was a reasonably sized amount of goat cheese was actually labeled “misc. cheese” and cost $14.70. Pardon my ignorance, but is this miscellaneous cheese made with milk from the famous cow that can actually jump over the moon? Did I “misc.” that bit of information when I didn’t read the label? (In my defense, it was on the bottom of the container.)
For that price, I could have bought my own cow on EBay, hired someone to milk it, commissioned a scribe to write “misc. cheese” on the package in Montblanc pen … and still spent less.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Pearl Street Market. They have amazing soups, sandwiches and prepared foods, it’s a great place for a quick bite and I am all about supporting local businesses. I do, however, more often than not walk out of there wondering how I just blew double-digit dollar bills, because it’s not hard.
At the end of the day, I really have no one to blame but myself. I walk into a store that I know isn’t cheap, grab things at random, don’t read the labels and then I’m stunned when my groceries turn out to be worth more than my life.
One would think that after I find myself in these situations on a regular basis, I would learn my lesson and take 2.5 seconds to check the price, but I’ll bet you my new cow that I’m not going to do that next time. Learning from your mistakes is largely a foreign concept to me.
Oh, and if you were wondering, this is the part where I figure out some questionable segue into a topic that would actually make this column applicable to a food and dining website and remotely relevant to its readers. A topic other than the daunting prospect of grocery shopping like a normal human being, of course.
Let’s see. Here are my parting words of “wisdom:” Go to epicurean markets, especially if they’re local, but choose wisely, buy sparingly and read the labels!
