Nebulous Mooch

Have you ever seen a show called Extreme Couponing? In case you haven’t, I’ll explain the premise. The show follows a coupon obsessed family as they plan a grocery store trip. Sounds like exciting stuff, right? I don’t know about how your shopping trips go, but you could make a whole reality show about my trips to the grocery store. It could be called How Did I Spend So Much.

These shopping trips are no normal shopping trips though. They involve hundreds of coupons, maps of the grocery store, and days of preparation. Their shopping takes hours and hours and most of those hours are spent being rung up by the cashier. Afterwards when everyone realizes that their savvy coupon clipping has just saved them $493.87 the entire store breaks into applause. How could you not applaud that kind of savings, even if you were the one stuck in line behind them for an hour?

My mother is no stranger to a coupon book. Reports say, that my sister has also taken to clipping coupons. I, on the other hand, do not even look at coupons.

If they had coupons for things I actually bought, I’d use them. But, coupons always seem to be things like cereal bars or sanitizing wipes. We don’t eat cereal, especially not in the bar form, and while I like sanitizing things as much as the next person, I don’t like the idea of buying anything that is called a wipe.

The extreme couponers can have their show, their epic shopping trips and their dancing at the cash register because they saved so much. I’ll continue to wonder aimlessly around the grocery store with no list and look shocked by the final bill at the register.

The following event occurred in December of 2010, but I kept forgetting to post it.

On a shopping trip to one of my mother’s favorite stores, The Homing Shopping Network Outlet Store, my sister found these crazy shoes.

They are obviously the results of a love affair between a sandal and a boot. I’m going to refer to them as bandals. I can’t figure out when you might wear a shoe of this nature. It seems to me that if you wore your bandals when it was warm outside your ankles would sweat. On the other hand if you wore your bandals when it was cold your toes would freeze. So I guess bandals are designed with moderate temperatures in mind, but I’m reluctant to expose my toes even in moderate temperatures. Bandals must not be for people who tend to have cold feet.

My sister has a knack for finding the funniest clothes in the store. On this shopping trip she also found a strange cardigan configuration that resembled bat’s wings. It looked something like this.

Okay, maybe my drawing doesn’t quite do it justice. The cardigan looked more like this.

She also took me to the mall at one point to show me a particularly unfortunate outfit a mannequin at Forever 21 was sporting. It looked something this.

Actually, it looked worse than that, but with artistic talents as advanced as mine it’s hard to draw something that looks as terrible as that outfit.

I had to buy a new pair of jeans recently and I found that it is much easier to find clothes to laugh at then it is to find clothes that I would actually wear.

The fire alarm started to sound when I was in the grocery store today. No one even flinched. They all just carried on shopping like nothing was happening. “What’s that?” I asked my husband just to make sure I wasn’t the only one hearing it.

“Sounds like the fire alarm,” he said. He didn’t seem concerned at all so I decided I shouldn’t be concerned either. I just continued picking out produce.

What’s the point of having fire alarms if everyone just ignores them?