Checking out Sam's club...again.

One or the other of us held membership at Sam's Club for years; Barbara through 1st Pres and me through Brentwood. However, we are long beyond those two relationships, and neither of us has been to Sam's since then. Sometimes the thought crossed our mind that maybe a membership to Sam's or Costco would be beneficial, but we never acted upon it. Then the other day we got a "Member for a Day" card in the mail from Sam's so we decided to check it out. Hey, we're retired - a trip to Sam's is a big outing for us!

Nothing much has changed. They still have good prices on merchandise, as long as you purchase in 55-gallon barrels or buy by the gross. We walked throughout the store checking out the things we normally buy, finding that we couldn't lift most of the bundled items, let alone be able to use them before their expire date. And the smaller items that seemed reasonable were not available in our brand.

We did buy a 6-pack of Puff's tissues (doesn't expire, stores out in the garage), a multi-pack of fabric softener (ditto), a couple of jars of peanut butter (looong shelf life) and a double bag of Mini-Wheat cereal (okay, had to make space on a shelf in the bonus room). And, I admit it - 4 pounds of pistachios. Hey, it was a good price!

But the best buy had to be sugar packets. For some reason you can't buy the little individual packets of sugar in Austin anymore. They disappeared from the shelves a couple of years ago and have never returned. And if you eat at the same restaurants consistently, they catch on when all the sugar packets disappear every time you come to dine and start hiding them. So I was delighted to find a box of 2000 packets at Sam's. Surely the corrugated carton held several smaller boxes of packets.

Or not.




Yep. That ought to hold me for a while. And I know what I'm giving for Christmas.