Don’t tell my wife. I did a bad thing. Seriously, don’t tell her.
The other day, I spent $5.49 on a 12-pack of Diet Pepsi. You know, the fridge pack of cans. $5.49! I don’t even drink Diet Pepsi. My wife does. So really, it’s her fault. It’s well documented that I drink regular Coca-Cola. But my wife likes Diet Pepsi.
So when I’m at the supermarket, I don’t buy Diet Coke. I buy Diet Pepsi. It’s what good husbands do. Unfortunately, the price of soda cans varies wildly. Sometimes a 12-pack is $3.00, a good price around here. Often you can find three 12-packs for $10, or $3.33 each, a decent price. But many times it’s $4.50 or more, sometimes as high as $5.99. I don’t know why the price swings so much. It doesn’t do that for other grocery items like milk or bread. For whatever reason, soda is unpredictable.
Soda is one of those supermarket items I hate to spend too much on. My wife’s the same way. If a 12-pack is $4.00, we won’t buy it and will check out another store or put off the purchase for a couple of days if we have more soda in the house. This has nothing to do with the recession (so far we have been mostly insulated from all that and have good, stable jobs, though we don’t and never have spent money like crazy). While I have been aware of food prices and might be more so these days, soda has always belonged to a different category for me. I don’t know why. Maybe because the price varies so much, I think I’m being ripped off when it’s higher than $3.50 for a 12-pack.
It’s weird. I’ll get a fountain soda at a restaurant for $1.50 or more without thinking twice, even though that’s mostly ice and is only a single serving. But triple that price — $4.50 — seems an outrageous amount to spend on 12 cans of soda, which is 12 servings. My wife and I will both order soda at a restaurant, $3.00 or more for just two drinks. But in the store, $5.00 for a 12-pack is an atrocity. heck, at a baseball game or amusement park I’ll spend $2.00 on a small bottle of soda — a single serving — without worrying about it. It’s only when I’m buying cans for our home supply that I become a soda miser. I don’t know what it is, but it isn’t rational.
So what drove me to spend $5.49 on a 12-pack? Walmart usually has lower prices. But I wasn’t near Walmart. And I’d already been to one of our two supermarkets a couple of days earlier, when my wife first told me she was running out of Diet Pepsi, and their prices weren’t any better than the one I was in now. There were no cases available (sometimes a case of 24 cans costs barely more than a 12-pack). My wife was out of soda and I’d told her I would get some.
Was I really going to drive all the way to a different store in order to save a dollar or two? Should my wife go soda-less because I have an insanely principled position on soda economics? No. I had to break soda’s hold on me. I bought the 12-pack for $5.49. It did not interfere with our ability to pay our mortgage. But I know that had I waited, had I worked harder, I could’ve gotten it for less. Admitting it in this public forum is not easy. Hopefully, my wife is not one of my readers. I couldn’t bear to bring this shame down on my entire family.
Am I nuts, or are you like this, too? Is there a certain product
you refuse to pay more for, even though you could afford it? Why
that product and not others? Do you find yourself driving from
store to store, wasting gas and time, to save a dollar, and only
for a certain product or kind of product and not others? What the
heck is that about? And why do 12-packs of soda double in price
when most grocery items don’t?
Scott Stein is the editor of When Falls the Coliseum: a
journal of American culture (or lack thereof) and the author of
the novel Mean Martin Manning.
