Thankful Thursday

Much to my old personal trainer's dismay, I have spent most of my life watching Diet Coke prices.  I religiously check the grocery ads each week to see if it's a "Coke Week" or a "Pepsi Week."  Both brands are rarely on sale in the same week.

Back in the day, twice a year - on Christmas and 4th of July - Diet Coke would go on sale for 99 cents a 6-pack.  I remember one year we bought about $100 worth and we built a fort in the garage.  Ahhh, childhood!

The days of 99 cents a 6-pack are long gone, and for a long time, the standard "good deal" was 5 12-packs for $10. 

 I used to think of Diet Coke pricing in terms of a 12-packs, so if there was a sale on 24-packs, I would divide it and think of what it would be for 12 cans.

Unfortunately, a couple of years ago the industry switched to 20-packs instead of 24.  Did they think we wouldn't notice?  Anyway, this made math a lot harder, so since they made the switch, I've started calculating down to the can level.  In case you're wondering, a good deal today is if you can find Diet Coke for around 25 to 27 cents a can.

What does this have to do with Thankful Thursday?

Well, for several weeks, Safeway has been doing special deals on Fridays and Mondays, and surprisingly, one of the days has included a $5 20-pack of Diet Coke.  It became so common for about a month, that I started to think it would always be there and I had no sense of urgency to go buy any.

Then it snowed, and I couldn't get to the grocery store....then the next week I fell asleep early and didn't make it to the grocery store.  I only made it in for 1 of the special $5 days actually....it's quite sad.  Last week, even though the $5 special was gone, there was a decent deal in place and I was running low on DC.  I planned to go the grocery store on Tuesday.  In fact, the next week's grocery ads arrived that day and alerted me to the fact that there would be NO good Coke deals in the coming week, so I definitely needed to make it to the store.

Then of course I fell asleep....and woke up at 11:30pm.

Dragging myself out of bed, I made it to Safeway.

When I got in line to pay for my Diet Coke (+ apples + a lemon + parmesan) at 11:52, there were 4 people in line in front of me.  Why were there so many people at Safeway at midnight!?!?  On a TUESDAY!!!

One guy in front of me must have realized that he didn't have his wallet, because he put all of his items back in his cart, swore, and left his cart by the cashier.

I checked out at 11:58pm - 2 minutes before I would have lost out on getting ANY sort of Coke deal.

Soooo...........

I am very thankful that the man in front of me forgot his wallet. :-)