It was supposed to be date night, but being the frugal person that I am, I had my mind on the sale that was about to end at the grocery store. It would be my last opportunity to hit the store before the sale was over. We had our date night, and then my husband accompanied me into the store because I needed him to do a separate transaction to maximize our savings for the evening. We picked up a few odds and ends as we walked through the store. My main purpose was for cereal and crackers, certainly not something that we could live on for a week, but available at a price I couldn’t pass up.
The grocery store layout is designed to sort of guide you right through the produce department, probably in hopes of you picking up a few things that aren’t on sale. They got us! We purchased some garlic, jalapenos, and shallots that weren’t included in the shopping trip, along with the green bell peppers that I had planned on for the low low price of three for a dollar. The garlic and jalapenos are actually quite affordable and bring a lot of flavor to a meal. The shallots, on the other hand, were a bit pricey at $2.99 per pound, something I didn’t know until checking with my husband after returning to the car since we had checked out separately. We’ve never cooked with shallots, but knew that they offered a milder flavor than onions, while still providing the familiar texture of onions.
The entire transaction went well except when it came to the shallots. I somehow just knew that they would be a problem. The cashier didn’t know what they were, and neither did the cashiers on either side of us. I explained that they were shallots, sort of similar to onions and she looked over the produce card for the item number since most produce are priced by weight. Shallots of course were not listed on the card, so she searched for another employee that could run over to produce to find the item number; no luck, so I offered to run over to the produce area myself. She turned me down, and out of frustration rang the shallots up as yellow onions.
After returning to the car, I explained to my husband the delay because of the shallots and asked him if he remembered what the price was. He of course remembered that they were $2.99 a pound, and I explained the whole incident and that the cashier wound up charging me for yellow onions instead of shallots. The ironic part is that my husband’s order came out higher than I expected because his cashier didn’t scan two of his coupons correctly, so in the end, it wound up being a wash.