There are two grocery stores in what I consider my neighborhood, and I patronize both of them. Not surprisingly, the frequency of my visits is about inversely proportional to the distance of the two stores from my home.

Some years ago, I succumbed to the lure of an in-store presentation at the one farther away from me, and accepted one of their shopper cards. I had to fill in a form with my name and address and I-can’t-remember-what-all-else to get it. Now when I shop there I get an occasional discount on a bag of grapes or a can of Italian-seasoned tomatoes, and they get a ton of information on my buying habits. I’m sure they lump me together with a lot of other people by age and gender and zip code, and produce massive amounts data for market researchers.

But every once in a while, when I run my card past the scanner at the self-serve checkout, I imagine that I can hear someone somewhere saying, “She’s back! Canned soup again? Wouldn’t you think, if she goes through that many rolls of paper towels, she’d buy the cheaper ones? Not a very smart shopper, is she?”

On the back of the card, it says the card is their property. Not mine, theirs. I’m not sure what to make of that.

The store closer to my home, the one where I shop most often, recently changed their name and parent company and theme colors and the arrangement of their aisles and their in-store brand. I guess they got a new manager, too, because about every third time I go in there, there’s this guy yelling at the employees. Loudly. In front of the customers. I wish he wouldn’t do that.

With their changes, this store is now pushing their own shopper card. And I do mean pushing. I have decided not to get one.

The first time I went through the check-out after all those changes, the checker asked if she could scan my card. When I said I didn’t have one, she asked if I wanted one, I said no, and that was the end of it. On my next trip, when the checker asked if she could scan my card and I said I didn’t have one, she said brightly, “I’ll get you one!” So she affixed a sticker to a card and a matching sticker to a form, ran the card over the scanner to calculate my discount, and handed me both the card and the form. I got a discount, and they got no information.

On my next trip, I loaded my purchases onto the conveyor belt as the customer ahead of me was paying, then stood and waited patiently. After the checker had handed the person in front of me his receipt and change, she turned back to me and just stood there looking at me. I just stood there looking at her. I smiled at her.

“Do you have your shopper card?” she asked.

“Nope,” I replied.

Without a word, she affixed a sticker to a card and a matching sticker to a form, ran the card over the scanner to calculate my discount, and handed me both the card and the form.

That’s when it became a game.

For a while I couldn’t decide on the exact nature of the game. But here’s what I have settled on: I will continue to collect cards until this initial promotional period is over. Then, without ever filling in one of those forms, I will take one of the cards back to the store with me to see what happens when I hand it to the checker. Will I get a discount? Will the computer recognize that they have no data attached to that card number? Will the checker offer me another new card? Another form?

Will that manager come over and yell at me, too?

KsSmallBiz.com, April 19, 2006

Posted by Sharon under Laughter | No Comments »

House. Monk. Lost.

The titles of three of my favorite tv programs are one-syllable word with an “o” as a vowel. Does that mean anything?

Posted by Sharon under Laughter | No Comments »

You see an old friend across the street, and start to wave. Just as she sees you, you realize that she’s not the person you thought she was; in fact, you don’t know her at all. Do you

   a) Try to pretend you’re waving at someone else?
   b) Turn your greeting into a cough and bring your hand to your mouth?
   c) Keep on waving, smile broadly, and walk away. Let her spend the rest of the day trying to figure out who you are.

Your office has two restrooms – one for men and one for women. These are one-seaters, with doors that lock. You’re a woman, and you need to go, but the ladies’ room is already occupied. You can’t wait, so you decide to use the men’s room. When you come out, the ladies’ room is empty, and there is a man standing there waiting, not very patiently. He looks at you suspiciously. Do you

   a) Make him stand there, hopping from one foot to the other, while you try to explain?
   b) Claim you can’t read?
   c) Drop your voice an octave, mumble something about cross-dressing, and wish you had put the seat back up?

Posted by Sharon under Laughter | No Comments »

I am not particularly afraid of bugs (with the exception of spiders larger than salad plates), and I am well aware of their astonishing survival skills. Killing one or two or five hundred of them doesn’t make a dent in their numbers.

So when one of them makes its way into my house, I take it outside rather than destroy it. It’s not entirely altruistic on my part. Spraying the creature with poison contaminates my air, too; and smashing it makes a real mess on my floor.

While I’m not really afraid of them, I’m also not interested in actually touching them. So I have invented an excellent bug-rescue kit, which I would like to pass along to you at no charge. Some assembly is required.

Equipment required:

• One clear plastic cup, no more than 5 inches high, and as wide at the opening as possible.

• One piece of very thin and very stiff cardboard, large enough to cover the opening of the plastic cup, but no larger than necessary. The back from a 5-by-8-inch tablet works well.

Assembly:

• Place equipment in a drawer handy to all household members.

Instructions for Use:

• Make sure that the intruder bug is on a flat, rigid surface, such as a window or wall. Caution: This will NOT work on draperies. The author knows this from personal experience.

• Sneak up on bug, and place opening of clear plastic cup over the bug, pressing firmly against the flat surface.

• Lift edge of cup very slightly, and slide cardboard between cup and flat surface. You might have to nudge the bug with the inside of the cup to get it to step onto the cardboard. This is where the thinness of the cardboard is important. That bug is going to try hard to get out of there, and if you have to lift the edge of the cup very far, it’s going to be crawling up your arm in a flash. And it’s already mad.

• Holding the cup firmly against the cardboard with one hand, lift the edge of the cardboard and slide other hand under the cardboard. Lift the whole apparatus from the flat surface. It’s probably pretty obvious by now that the rigidity of the cardboard is vital. I mean, if you tried this with a piece of floppy yellow tablet paper, there’s no way you could keep that little fellow in the cup.

• Carry the whole thing to the door. Now you know why I specified the cup had to be no more than 5 inches tall. See, you forgot to open the door before you got the little monster trapped. So if you can’t hold the cup and the cardboard together with just one hand, you’re standing in the middle of the room with one really angry bug with a 3-inch stinger on his butt, and no way to get him outside. You could stand there until your kids get home from school. Or you could try putting the thing down on the floor while you open the door, but plastic cups are pretty light, and bugs can easily lift several times their own weight. So just make sure the cup is short and the cardboard is small enough to be held together with one hand. You might want to practice ahead of time.

• Open the door. Take the whole thing outside, and pick out a new home for the bug. Now you will understand why I told you it had to be a CLEAR plastic cup. You’re getting ready to let the thing go, it’s mad at you, and if the cup is opaque, you wouldn’t know where it is. You would be holding in your hand the entomological equivalent of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle – you don’t know where the bug is until you look, and the very act of looking will change where the bug is, because when you lift the cup, that sucker’s gonna MOVE! You might even begin to doubt yourself, and wonder if the bug is actually still back in the house, getting ready to slam the door, lock you out, and get on the phone to call its buddies and tell them you’re out there. Worse yet, it might be poised to jump out and fly at your nose. But if the cup is transparent, you can shake it over to one side, pull the cardboard away, and let it go.

• If the bug is, in fact, a spider larger than a salad plate, I recommend throwing the whole contraption at a bush, running back up on the porch and dancing from foot to foot and flapping your arms around until the fiend has slunk away, then retrieving the kit for future use.

• Yell, “Godspeed, bug!”

• Try to explain yourself to the neighbors.

Posted by Sharon under Laughter | 3 Comments »