The wastefulness of noncommunication
July 17, 2008
We have got to think before we buy. My parents and I share grocery shopping duties: they buy the Asian groceries and I shop the American sales for staples like bread, milk, juice, eggs, lunch meats, salad, and some fruits. Sometimes veggies. Because I live right across the street from Trader Joe’s, I always stop by there to pick up my eggs for half the price (or less!) of eggs from the other grocery stores. The point is, I’m the egg girl. I always buy the eggs. I thought we had that settled.
You can imagine my surprise, then, when I came home laden with groceries on Sunday including two dozen eggs (I splurged because we run out of one dozen too quickly) to find two 18-count cartons of eggs squatting in the fridge. Yep. Three dozen.
Apparently they’d been to Costco and got three dozen for $4.50, which works out to the same price of my eggs. So we had five dozen eggs in the fridge and I don’t know of any recipe that could possibly induce me to use that many eggs. Maybe a good old fashioned pound cake, but that’d probably call for two pounds of butter.
Boiled eggs for breakfast? Egg salad? Deviled eggs? Cholesterol problems via eggs, anyone?
It just seemed like such a waste of time, energy and gas to go back to the store and return them, if I could, for $3. And a silly story, at that. At the same time, I could not stand the idea of not returning them because three people cannot that many eggs consume. Back to the store, then, where I foolishly explained the dilemma and the store manager looked at me strangely, but refunded my three dollars.
It would have been nice to save two trips to TJs had my parents simply picked up their handy dandy cell phones and asked me before buying. Lesson learned? Tune in next week!
The eggs won’t go bad if you store them properly. They just won’t be freshly perfect. As eggs age, they lower the grade, that’s why you don’t see Grade B eggs anymore. Usually the fresh Grade A ones are the only ones in the store.
mapgirl: Really? So how long DO they stay good for? I just didn’t think they’d make it to the fourth or fifth week.