LIFE'S OUTTAKES
By Daris Howard
Gazette Contributor
I just saw the most incredible sale! It was totally unbelievable! I’m sure you won’t believe me, but it was true. The flashing sign of a local drug store is advertising bread at “.99 cents” a loaf.
Wow! What a door crasher that must be! I bet they were sold out within minutes of opening. Bread for under a penny a loaf. Why I haven’t seen bread at that price since... Come to think of it, I’ve never seen bread at that price. Most bread I’ve seen costs around a dollar when it is on sale.
My father talked about prices like that during the depression, but this is the 21st century. I was thinking I might take a dollar in there and get a hundred loaves and tell them to keep the change. I considered getting one and trying to frame it somehow. That way when an old timer started to tell me what it was like in the good old days I could point to the plaque of bread on my wall and say, “Yeah, well I remember when a person could get bread for less than a penny.”
But the other day, I saw an even better sale on squash. It was at “.10 cents” a pound. That means, for a penny, I could get ten pounds of squash. Squash is all right, but what would I do with ten pounds of it, and if I bought less, how would they give me change? Unless... That does give me an idea. One of my neighbors stuffed my car so full of squash while I was at church last summer, that I had to walk home, since there was no room to drive. It could be payback time. For ten dollars I could get five ton of squash and fill his whole garage.
My wife thinks I am hallucinating and my mathematician brain is working overtime. I just like to look at things logically, especially when it comes to numbers. She says that is not what they mean, but I’m sure with the truth in advertising laws they are just having incredible sales.
I try to watch carefully for these kind of bargains. Opportunities like this don’t come around often, though I must admit I see more of them than I would suspect. Why, I saw in an ad that a bank was now giving 110 percent. What a return that is! My wife said it only meant their service, but I informed her that a person can’t give more than everything, or it would not have been everything in the first place. With that explanation I informed her that it has to be an interest rate. What else could it be? After all, they are in the banking business and they know numbers, so surely they know what 100 percent means.
Then there was a local store that had a 150% off sale. That is one of the best. I was going to walk into the store and tell them I wanted everything they had and they could just write me a check for the extra 50%.
She just shakes her head at me and refuses to let me anywhere near those great sales. She says I will embarrass her.
Well, I’ve got to wrap this up. I just noticed that the local grocery store has a sign that says its boxes of hot chocolate are “.99 cents”. I love hot chocolate and I have ten dollars in my pocket. I think I’ll go buy a thousand of them.
(Daris Howard, award-winning syndicated columnist and playwright, is author of “Super Cowboy Rides” and can be contacted at daris@darishoward.com; or visit his website at http://www.darishoward.com).
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