Every week, I get a “Your Weekly Savings” email from Safeway. First off: don’t ask me how you can get in on the action. It’s a very exclusive club. They can’t have common riff-raff attempting to save 50 cents on Yoplait or anarchy will ensue!
Not that you’re missing out on much. Case in point:
Wow. I can save a whopping 12 cents! That’s about 1/38th the price of a gallon of gas ’round here. How generous, Corporate Grocery Chain.
They were a little more generous with this cheese deal…
But, c’mon. It’s not even good cheese! That’s their private label brand. Lucerne cheese is made in Ohio, for crying out loud. OHIO. They could at least offer up savings on some Wisconsin cheese!
On my last post, The Travel Architect commented that she and her husband have a touch faucet in their kitchen, so whenever they go anywhere—which is pretty often, given her blog name—they always touch the faucet stem and expect it to turn on. I chuckled over this, because I do the same thing with glass doors. Well, no…I don’t touch them and expect water to gush out. But I always think they’re going to open for me automatically, as they do at Corporate Grocery Chains and many other stores and offices. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve nearly hurtled my body through a closed glass door with the expectation that it was about to swoosh open for me.
Another thing that always seems to screw me up is automatic soap dispensers in public bathrooms. Many times I’ve rinsed my hands and then held them beneath the dispenser, waiting for a dollop of soap that never materializes. Makes me feel pretty stupid when there are people at adjoining sinks. I’ll sometimes pretend I was examining something on my hands. Ha-ha, meant to do that! And then press the button for the soap.
Hell, even if there is an automatic soap dispenser—or water faucet, for that matter—half the time getting the damn thing to work is an exercise in futility. I’ll be standing there, waving my hands around, and nothing will come out. Or it will, but then it’ll stop mid-stream because…I don’t know. I moved out of the way of the sensor? There’s a timer? They’ve rigged a hidden camera and are laughing at the latherer’s expense? So, now I’m flapping my hands around in exaggerated fashion, like a puppeteer on meth or the world’s most expressive mime, and droplets of water are flying everywhere because my hands are wet.
And you wonder why I long to be Amish sometimes.
Hey, remember that time I was all gung-ho about investing in crypto? Boy, am I glad I pulled out after a few weeks. Bitcoin was selling at $47,000 the first time I bought it. Lately, it’s been hovering around $20K. Ouch.
I still have my account. I put a few hundred dollars into it, so if there’s some miraculous rebound, I might yet be able to buy that coveted yacht.
Wait. I forgot. I’m anti-boat now.
In any case, I took the money I was going to invest in crypto, and bought myself a remote starter for my car instead. Come November, I’ll be real happy I did that!
Actually, come 5:00, I’ll be plenty happy. ‘Cause it’s going to hit 90° today, and I made sure to leave the A/C switched on when I came back from lunch. One quick press of the key fob 10 minutes before I leave and I should be greeted with frosty, refreshing air when I slide behind the wheel after work.
I don’t know how our ancestors survived unspeakable hardships like dysentery when I yelp like a wounded gazelle if the steering wheel is too hot to the touch.
Mark My Words 
Love the pic of the remote car starter. That is pretty fancy! 90 degrees – Tara must be getting some great growth in her garden. Any homemade salsa or strawberry salads yet? And I bet those would be so good that you wouldn’t even need any Ohio cheese in them!
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She’s getting terrific growth, especially from the spinach and potatoes. No tomatoes yet, but those always take a bit longer. We’re eagerly counting down the days to all that tasty fresh produce!
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I did LOL at those ads! I mean, how are they not ashamed of themselves for promoting those ‘savings’??? Absurd. I’m glad to hear it’s not just me waving my hands all over in public restrooms. I rarely get any of it to work and have had complete strangers try to assist me. Embarrassing.
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Just yesterday, I had issues with the soap dispenser in a winery. It’s madness!
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We just got a new faucet in our kitchen and it is touch-y. I never thought of getting a touchless one because like you I have trouble with the automatic soap dispensers. On the other hand I’d very much like an automatic remote car starter. That’s technology I can get into.
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I’m just happy to hear I’m not the only one who has issues with automatic-anything!
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I don’t even bother with savings these days; I buy what I want at whatever price. I’ve never heard of a fancy faucet like that; like you I struggle with automatic water, soap or towels in bathrooms. I have to do interpretive dance to get them to work. I have an issue of thinking that every computer screen is a touch screen.
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Ha…Tara does that with the touch screen. Her laptop has one, mine doesn’t, so anytime she uses the Mac, she tries to swipe a screen that refuses to budge.
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After my brother ran through glass patio doors when he was young (not a mark on him, to re-assure you, unlike the time a chicken chased him 😉 ), I’ve always assumed that stuff requires manual intervention. It does mean that I look an ass when I spend ages looking for the switch, handle, button, whatever while everyone else just waves their hands and it works.
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Way to leave me hanging with that chicken tease!
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😀 😀
My brother is now a big lump of a rugby playing guy, so we enjoy teasing him. As children, we used to rampage around our local area in Nigeria – one of the places being the chicken farm. We’d climb in, not to do anything to the chickens which were usually in their pens, but to see if the chicken farmer would catch us and switch our legs. While running away, my brother encountered a chicken and – in fright – changed direction, right down a ditch where cut his leg (quite badly) on a piece of something-or-the-other. He was my mother’s favourite and younger than me, so I got in a LOT of trouble for that – and he gets teased about the scar on his leg from being chased by a chicken by more than just the family 🙂
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That’s an egg-ceptional story! But if I were him, yeah…I probably wouldn’t be crowing about it either. Thank you for sharing.
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Your puns take the prize 🙂
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I always have had a reputation for dad jokes.
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Mark-Did the remote start thingy come with instructions on how to use it? I bought a new car equipped with something similar for potential winter warmups (of steering wheel, seats, engine) here in MI. Since I got it less than a week before I left So Cal for my summer cross-country road trip there was no time to learn to operate all the bells and whistles and other fancy stuff it comes with. If I’d had enough time I could have scheduled a session or a few with the Subaru dealer’s concierge to help me with this. Incredibly, when I asked the local Kalamazoo Subaru dealer about making an appointment with their concierge, they had no idea what I was talking about!
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Yes, it came with instructions…plus, they walked me through the process when I picked my car up. Good thing; learning it on the fly, as you had to do, would have been tricky!
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Just came back from Grand Rapids where I got most of the training I lacked to be able to get the most from the bells and whistles in my new vehicle. Turned out he’s the dealer’s tech guy so most of what he does is figuring out how to use all the stuff on all their cars. Of course, those features are not consistent across years or models, which is what makes it a full-time job! He was not identified as a concierge and his services are supposed to be for people who buy new cars but I know I’ll be able to call on him in the future. In fact, I’ve already thought of a couple of things I forgot to ask him this time/session!
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I’m glad he was able to help you out! Hopefully you won’t have any issues when you go to use it next time.
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Clearly your store is owned by the same co as my beloved store that recently closed. I recognize that “for U” business. Those “deals” are often crapola.
Glad you sprung for the remote starter.
Was totally feeling the stupidity with the water, soap, and hand towel dispensers on my recent trip. I took to putting my hands under two of each at a time, like playing adjacent slot machines. I rarely won.
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Ugh. Don’t you hate it when corporate behemoths close down some of their underperforming but beloved local stores? Nothing chaps my hide more.
If you come up with a winning formula for the automatic dispensers, let me know, would you?
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I had a theory that maybe you need to keep your hand steady rather than waving it about, but I didn’t do enough test studies to find out for sure. I suspect you need to first have your hand positioned in precisely the right spot first. I never did find out the magic formula. I think your hidden camera theory is the best explanation for this phenomena.
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My theory is that they turn off after a few seconds regardless of your hand position! But that’s hard to prove.
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