In Which I Made My Wife Get Up Early to Stand in Line to Get a $5 Gift Card

Last week, our local health food store had a grand re-opening. They'd just redone the floors and moved some stuff around & in celebration they decided to have a re-opening extravaganza in which the first 50 people through the doors got a gift card valued anywhere from $5 to $100. (mostly $5.)

Well, that $100 gift card was enticing enough to get me out of bed at 6 am on a Saturday morning and  drag my wife with me to go wait in the cold. Of course, when we got there, there were already a TON of people waiting in line. Too tired (or lazy) to count how many people were in line ahead of us (I'd only had one cup of coffee at this point), we waited in line with the rest of the folks & said a little "let me be in the first 50 prayer."

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We weren't. We were numbers 59 and 60 (or there abouts, because why bother counting at that point?). While we waited, though, they gave us reusable shopping bags (a $2.99 value—woo!). By the time we got to the doors to shake the manager's hand as he said "welcome," I was ready to turn tail—but the regional PR person pulled out another stack of gift cards (all $5 she told us), and handed them out to the remaining folks in line. Which was brilliant as we were starting to wake up and get a little cranky (some of us rather embarasingly realizing that we were still wearing our pajamas).

With two more reusable grocery bags in our ever mounting collection, and $10 in gift cards in hand, we did what anyone who'd only had one cup of coffee would do at 7 o'clock in the morning: we got more coffee.

Our coffee of choice is Counter Culture—which is not the cheapest coffee, even when on sale. (Usually $12.99 / 12 oz bag, which works out to be over $17 / lb.) I try to stock up on it when it's BOGO (which happens like once a year), but on this day it was $8.99. We got 3 bags and used our $10 gift cards to bring the price down to about $5.75 a bag. SCORE! Then we put the 3 bags in our 2 bags and headed home, where we proceeded to recover from our early morning adventure.

The things I'll do to save a few bucks.