Welcome to the Burbs!

Here's the background...

This is my life. I live in the 21st Century Southwest United States suburbs. Our homes are covered in pastel stucco and have red tile roofs. Our shopping centers have similarly colored stucco (although the new trendy color is mustard yellow and burnt orange. Yummy!) We have malls with Best Buys and Home Depots. We have Chili's Restaurants, Johnny Carinos, On the Border and BJs. We have Barnes and Noble or Borders bookstores and there are so many Staryucks that they're finally starting to close some of them but all of the new ones they're building have drive-thrus.

On the weekends we attend our local church which sells SCRIP fundraiser. SCRIP, for those of you who don't know, is awesome. The church buys gift cards and certificates from a warehouse which sells them for 2-10% below retail value. The church resells them to members at face value, and makes money. It costs us nothing more than what we would already spend at these stores and restaurants. The biggest seller at our church are the cards for our three local grocery stores. The cards for my particular store only come in $25 increments so sometimes I have to use multiple cards in one transaction but the clerks at the store totally know the routine.

I always go to the same clerks at the store. They're the ones who make sure my coupons double properly. They're the ones who recognize me and are friendly when I get to the line. We work efficiently together because I know how to enter my club card number, hand off my coupons, process my payment and get the heck out of Dodge. They do not card me for booze because it's painfully obvious that I am over 21 and 25 and 30. They do not card me for my checks when I write them because I have written so many checks over the years that I am in the system. 

I have a club card for my grocery store and I clip coupons. I regularly save 25 to 60% on my grocery bill using my club card and coupons. I used to subscribe to an online service which provided me with a weekly shopping list to maximize my savings but when their website stopped working with my operating system and no one bothered to update the FAQ and the break cause my customer service inquiries to never be received by their company, I cancelled my subscription. After a few years, I have the coupon pattern memorized and I can even foresee sales a week before the service puts them on the shopping list.

I have two school-aged children so I go shopping on Monday and Tuesday mornings when they are in school and the sale prices at the grocery store are the "hottest" in combination with the aforementioned coupons.

I even drive a white Honda mini-van. These things are even (finally) getting more popular than Suburbans again!

In short, I'm a mom.

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Sometimes, at the grocery  store, you get slowed down. Sometimes the person in front of you has a credit card that's rejected. Sometimes the ATM machine just doesn't seem to work.

The worst are the WIC customers.

Now, this is not a commentary on Welfare. It's a commentary about how WIC works. WIC, Women, Infants and Children, issue specific food coupons to clients. One coupon will be good for cheese - a specific amount and type of cheese. Another coupon will be good for cereal. It's a specific brand and type of cereal - Cheerios will work but Frosted Cheerios don't work. If a person wants 3 boxes of Cheerios, she needs three coupons. There are milk coupons and others. As the clerk rings up the items, she has to enter the coupons. This can reallllly slow down the check-out process. And you can't always tell who has the stacks of WIC vouchers before you get into line. So if you get stuck behind a WIC client, that's probably the worst way to get stuck in line at the grocery store.

Sometimes, I have to confess, I like getting stuck behind a slower person. I like to organize my groceries on the belt. I put the heavy stuff in front so that those bags go on the bottom of my cart. There's less chance of bread and veggies and fruits getting squished that way. I like to put my cold items together and my cleaning supplies and personal toiletries together so they have a better chance of getting into the same bags together. The better I pack my belt, the better the clerks pack my bags. I can choose who the cashier is going to be by which line I select, but I can't make sure I am going to get one of the good "courtesy clerks". 

When you're a mom in the suburbs, you learn these things.

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This morning started off painfully, as many do. CS was not happy. He had not eaten breakfast and he had gone beyond the point of rationalizing. After we took the big boys to school, we went to Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf and I ordered a small nonfat milk for him. He refused to drink it. In fact, he had a temper tantrum inside of the restaurant.

Been here, done this. I picked up my wallet and my child. I left the drinks and told the staff I'd be right back. I put him in his carseat - the PerkyMomMobile was parked just outside the door of the coffee store. I left the door of my car open, ran back into the store, and grabbed our drinks and my glasses case.

Eventually, he drank the milk. I knew he would. It wasn't the worst morning of my life. It wasn't even all that uncommon. It just is what it is when you have a stubborn 4-year-old.

After swim lessons and taking care of some personal and scouting business, I was ready to go to the grocery store. By this time. Mr. Hyde had disappeared and my sweet loving 4-year-old had returned. He ran ahead of me at the grocery store so I plopped him in the cart seat and said "When you run away from me, I can't let you walk. You have to ride." He acted mad at me as long as it took to get from the soda machine to the produce department. 

We shopped. He hugged me while I pushed the cart and told me how great I was. Then he reminded me that he wanted to have for lunch what MG had for dinner last night - a Banquet Chicken Pot Pie. They were on sale for the low club price of 75 cents per pot pie so being the very very generous mother that I am, I agreed to buy him a pot pie for lunch. 

Eventually I found my way to the line to check out. I chose a "regular" line because I of course had too many items for the Express Line. And this is where the REAL story begins...

The clerk was a supervisor who I "know" and she flew through my groceries. I gave her my two coupons, typed in my phone number, and told the "courtesy clerk" that I did not need help out to my car. I slide one of my gift cards through the machine, she punched the button on her side, it went through.

Now sometime in this process, a woman and her friend got in line behind me. The friend went over to the Staryucks counter to get drinks while the woman waited in line with me to check out. I don't know why they decided on my line instead of the Express Line, but ok. 

I slid my second gift card through the machine, the clerk did her button and it didn't work.

I slid a third card through and it wasn't working, either.

But the clerk was happy to help me. She offered to run the cards on her side of the register. I handed them over to her and she started scanning barcodes on the back of the cards.

Somewhere in there is when the woman behind me started sighing and rolling her eyes. And you know, for as much as I like to think I have ovaries of steel, I started to feel stressed out. "Oh dear, I'm like the WIC moms."

But you know what? It just WASN'T THAT BAD.

No one forced this woman to get in line behind a MOM. My son was sitting in the cart cheerfully telling me all about how we would cook his pot pie for lunch when we got home. The clerk was smiling as she scanned my cards and they worked! Here I thought I had two cards that might not have been properly activated before I paid for them and she got both of them to work! And goodness knows, I wasn't handing her stacks of vouchers that were going to take 10 minutes to process one at a time!

So when it was time for me to pull out my Debit card to pay for the balance of my groceries, I just did it. I didn't care what the twit behind me in line thought. Or at least I cared a lot less. The clerk snapped my tape off the register and told me just how much my club card and coupons had saved me today. I pushed my cart out of the way so I could pack up my purse away from the stand. I didn't do it to kiss up to the twit woman, I did it because it's what I always do because I'm a generally considerate person in life. That's why I'm cute and perky.

On my way out of the store, I stopped at the soda fountain to refill my..... diet Pepsi, DUH! As I turned around to leave, I saw the twit woman and her friend. Standing at Staryucks. They still had a few minutes to wait for their drinks from what I saw.

So much for getting through that line so fast. Man, getting pissy and annoyed was so worth it, wasn't it?

Welcome to the Burbs, Lady. Don't go to suburban grocery stores if Moms are gonna annoy you.