Black Silk ... By The Pound

Today I went to ... wait for it ... Wal-Mart! Yes! I made my twice-weekly pilgrimage to purchase everything from Caffeine Free Diet Pepsi (my hooch of choice, after coffee) to Purina Little Bites (Javier's perpetual menu). Today my shopping list was not long, but for some reason it took me forever to make my way around the massive store. I was somewhat discombobulated from having gotten up early to take my car to the dealership for service, which meant I was stranded there for four hours. And someone had eaten all the Krispy Kreme donuts before I ever got to the waiting room! The nerve ... by the way if you haven't seen the 2008 Cadillac CTS in Black Cherry, you should really check that out.

Years ago I saw a TV show all about Wal-Mart: the story of how Sam Walton built his retail empire, a tour of the frumpy corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, how you go about getting Wal-Mart to carry your product, all the Walton family members who help run the whole thing, et cetera. At one point they showed footage of some sort of convention of Wal-Mart store managers. The speaker for the meeting was explaining to hundreds of managers the economic impact to Wal-Mart over the space of a fiscal year if, in every Wal-Mart store all over the world, the ladies in the fabric department cut just one thumbs-width of fabric more than the customer was charged for the order.

That one thumb-width of fabric that would be "given" to the customer, multiplied by all the millions of thumb-widths accrued in a year's time, amounted to a lot of lost revenue ... and the bean counters at Wal-Mart had calculated the loss to the penny. And they felt strongly enough about it to have everyone hold up their thumb, supposedly to sear it in their memory that one thumbs-width of, say, black silk, included free in an order, could eventually cost them their jobs! They were likely sucking their thumbs before it was over, and rocking in a corner somewhere.

Personally, I think Wal-Mart has a built-in way to compensate for all the thumb-width overages that all the fabric-cutters in all Wal-Mart stores around the globe might be guilty of. And that is, they consistently try to overcharge me for my groceries. You have to watch them like a hawk -- a hawk on a fixed income! For example, today I bought several bags of red and black seedless grapes (which I like to freeze because I enjoy them frozen, like little popsicles). The smiley-faced placards above all the grapes proclaimed them to be $1.24 per pound (a very good price). Yet when the cashier placed my grapes on the scale and punched in their code, the price came up as $1.77 per pound. I had to make sort of an issue about the discrepancy in the posted price and the charged price, until she took my word for it and re-rang the grapes. But what if I hadn't seen the wrong price come up? I would have paid $.53 more per pound for my grapes than I had planned on paying ... and that's a lot of thumb-widths.

One place I let them "get" me today was when I selected my coffee. Normally I don't even study the coffee brands or prices; I like Folgers Coffeehouse Series French Roast. I buy it in the "brick" packaging, then empty the coffee into my canister at home. I had actually put one of the French Roast bricks in my basket when something caught my eye: a big red canister of Folgers Coffeehouse Series Black Silk. Black Silk! Something new! Dark roast ... "bold, yet smooth" the label promised! That just sounded so good, so I put the brick back on the shelf and decided to try the Black Silk, although the 31.5-ounce canister cost $9.18. I guess at that paltry price, giving me that last half-ounce -- making it an even two pounds  -- would have been like giving up a thumb-width. Wal-Mart would certainly not survive that! I'll let you know how I like the coffee.