Thrift Week 2021, Day 6: Gifts

Throughout most of my Thrift Week adventures, I've been shopping locally for myself — or, in the case of groceries, for me and Brian together. Today, I decided to shake things up a little bit and pick up a few treats specially for him.

Some background: for the past several weeks, Brian has been wrestling with a grant proposal for work. Actually, I probably shouldn't say "wrestling," because that would be much less exhausting. It might be more demanding physically, but it wouldn't be anywhere near as emotionally draining. Picture a man walking around with a fifty-pound pack on his pack and another on his chest, 24/7, and you'll get an inkling of how much this has taken out of him.

As we came into the last week of the project, I promised him repeatedly that we could do absolutely anything he wanted (within current social distancing requirements) to celebrate when it was over. A special dinner? No problem — I'd even watch him eat steak, as long as I didn't have to join in. A dumb superhero movie? I would watch it without complaints. After what he'd been through, he deserved nothing but the best.

The problem was, Brian has made such a habit of self-denial that I feared he wouldn't take me up on it. So I decided to take matters into my own hands. I would go out for my walk today — by myself, while he was stuck at home laboring to push the grant proposal through its last few remaining steps — and pick up some special goodies that he likes and I don't. Then he'd have to eat them or let them go to waste.

I tried to find some marzipan, but the assortment of Valentine candy at Rite Aid didn't include any, and the little independent sweet shop on Raritan Avenue was closed. I also considered a bottle of amaretto, but since I'd bought him half a dozen bottles of his favorite tawny port for Christmas, I figured he wouldn't have that much use for any other drink for a while. So instead, I stopped into the little Greek grocery on Woodbridge avenue and got him a little jar of olives, which I loathe, and some hazelnut chocolate, which I'm fairly indifferent to. Total: $5.94 for both. 

Neither of these is something I normally buy, but I just checked the price of olives online and found they're around $7 for a one-pound jar. This was 13 ounces for $5, or about $6.15 per pound, so once again, the local store was actually cheaper in this case. The $1 chocolate-hazelnut bar would probably only have cost around 50 cents at Aldi, but that still puts me about 19 cents ahead. And in any case, it was a trivial price to pay to treat Brian after all he's been through.

I also made one other impulse purchase. As I was passing through town, I saw a guy recruiting volunteers for a workers' organization in New Brunswick. I knew I didn't have time for that in my schedule, but I had cash to spare, so I blew $20 on of the group's calendars. I'd been wanting a bigger calendar than the dinky one we got this year from the Nature Conservancy anyway, and this was a chance to help a good cause at the same time. I could have bought one on sale for around $8, so my local shopping premium in this case was $12 — the only significant cost I've had so far throughout the entire challenge. But it's not clear if it should even count, since it was really more of a donation than an expense.

As it happened, that wasn't my only shopping excursion today. Once Brian had finished slaying the grant, we made a jaunt out to the H-Mart to pick up some groceries, including the eggs we didn't buy at Stop & Shop earlier this week. But though we spent around $39 bucks on them all told, everything we bought was something we would normally buy at H-Mart anyway, so there's no question of paying anything extra for shopping local there.

So, total spending for today: around $65. Cost premium for shopping local: around $12 if you count the calendar, or negative 18 cents if you don't. One more day to go before we tally it all up.