Stamped Out

I ever so vaguely recall in my youth a tepid effort by my mother to collect these silly little stamps at the local grocery -- the renowned S&H Green Stamps -- all in the not fully articulated aspiration of getting something for nothing. I mean, in my small and unworldly head at the time, that’s the way it struck me. You buy food, you get stamps, you claim stuff you really don’t need and, most importantly, you feel you’ve bested the system. We had these little books designed to hold these stamps and, despite my own doubts, we would watch their numbers grow with elevated salivation imagining all manner of trophy acquisitions that one could just not live without.

We now flash forward more than a half century and find history biting me in the ass. Why? Because our local Piggly Wiggly announced a campaign to issue “stickers” to one and all in the hopes that one great day we could all enrich ourselves with a potpourri of Cuisinart appliances and cookware. I’m not sure where I went wrong, but I ever so quickly pushed aside my decades-long impression of these kinds of promotions and embraced this one with a vengeance. Here was the deal: for every $10 worth of grocery purchases, you would be issued a sticker that had a picture of the lovable pig himself on it although that was hard to tell since each sticker was no larger than a mosquito bite. When the promotion expired in January, you would check your accumulation and come reap your reward whether that might be a new frying pan, coffee maker, juicer, assorted pots, etc. You decide.

What ensued was madness. First, the stamps were so miniscule, you had to almost place them in a special padlocked container just to get them safely home. Put them in your shopping bag? Forget about it. Put them in your pocket? Gone. I am convinced the good folks at the Pig designed these things to be so small knowing that 40% of them would never make it out of their parking lot. (Speaking of which, when the checkout ladies started spreading the word that alot of customers were losing their stickers while returning to their cars, you could unerringly find an enterprising shopper or two kicking stuff around on the asphalt outside trying to dig up this lost gold.) Second, should you be lucky enough to get the stickers home, you faced the infuriating task of separating them and attempting to enter them in the microchip-sized slots in the flimsy “booklet” provided by the Pig. Stickers would stick to themselves, and it became de rigueur to mumble a fine litany of cuss words when attempting to roughly fit each stamp into its intended miniature slot. Third, irrational reasoning took hold at shopping outings when your shopping list would clearly become second banana -- if I may use that term here -- to sticker acquisition strategies. For example, maybe, just maybe, you feel a rising urge to buy another bottle of olive oil -- just so you don’t run out -- even when there might be some weeks left in the supply you already had. And, thoughts like, “you can never have enough hummus” creep into your head when passing that stuff. Ditto for the Wheat Thins. And, God forbid you should find yourself at check out and find you’re 49 cents short of getting another sticker. Panic sets in while you desperately reach across waiting shoppers in the checkout line behind you so you can stretch to reach the display of breath mints and chewing gum that would enable you to cross the magic line to that next, fabulous sticker. Fourth, whenever the shopper in front of you would decline the stickers he or she had just earned, you find yourself winking at the checkout girl asking if you could take the unclaimed stickers. And, lastly, you start working the neighbors asking them to give you their stickers if they were not otherwise collecting. These are the depths, I tell you.

After all this, the Day of Irony arrives and you have to figure out what you want to claim with your horde of hard earned stickers. Will it be the non-stick pan, the hand blender, the pour saucepan?? It is in that moment that it sinks in. The joy -- if one can call it that -- was all in the chase, not in the acquisition. Did we really need another frying pan? Would we ever use a hand blender? Didn’t I already bemoan the number of pots we owned? But, choices needed to be made, and so choices were made. In a vaguely joyless move, I opt for a 2 quart pour saucepan and the juicer. The game is over. I can breathe again.

Lemonade anyone?