Many, many years ago someone (memory totally eludes me at this point) introduced Mike & I to warehouse shopping - Sam's Club. Living in a remote area of the state, especially back in the day when price gouging all us noobies relocating into this area was quite common, buying in bulk seemed a lifesaver for families - especially ours. Nearly everything we used was purchased in lots of 3, 6, 9, 12 or more units.
Need a tube of toothpaste? Why not a three-pack? Running low on Irish Spring? Grab a 12 bar package down that isle. The kids need spiral notebooks for class? Grab a package of 24 next time we're at "the store". We even added shelves downstairs in the basement to store our inventory of bulk purchases! There are still flats of canned vegetables - yes, they've been rotated and we eat them too - down there on the shelves.
From five-gallon pails of laundry detergent to frozen lasagna we have bought nearly everything with shelf-life in bulk. We get milk, eggs, fresh veggies, etc at the local grocery store and seriously, Wilbur's meat department cannot be beat! They have the best cuts of meat and pricing ever.
Today the inevitable has happened ... the last square of toilet paper on the roll. We really should have picked up TP when we got that new membership for Costco back at the end of November. We didn't though. After buying the membership, we went into the store and looked around. We stopped by the Verizon shop in there and didn't get a phone to replace mine. :-( I'm not sure, we may have left from the store empty-handed ... it was just that drive to be part of "wholesale" shopping that got us in there at all.
Now, we're going to have to purchase toilet paper at regular retail price. This is going to require some serious rethinking of our shopping habits now that all the kids are gone.
