I went to Aldi today to do my grocery shopping. I tend to go there because they generally have good produce prices, and I like that they have limited selection. I’m one of those shoppers who likes limited selection because having too much to choose from just confuses me. Ideally, I would shop at the co-op or farmers market all the time, but there are just too many things there – and at the co-op, many of them are incredibly expensive. And Aldi, despite its limited selection, has a variety of organic products and fair trade coffee. (They usually only offer two varieties of bagged fair trade coffee, although this week they are also offering a couple extra varieties as a special. I was excited about this until I found out that both the extra varieties are dark roast. Boo!)
Anyway, the big savings today was an unplanned Greek yogurt bonanza. My store had several cups of an organic variety that was expiring today. To get rid of them, they were selling them for five cents a piece. I bought 16 of them. Usually, I make my own Greek yogurt, but hey – at this price I couldn’t afford not to buy it. Since I like my yogurt on the only-mildly sweet side, I will likely eat this yogurt without stirring in the fruit and sugar on the bottom, and then just dump the syrupy stuff when I’m done eating.
After Aldi I went to the Dollar Tree. I wanted to buy picture frames for my office. If I were going to be picky, I would get a bunch of these 8 by 10 frames, because that’s the style I’m using on a different wall in my office (there is a thrift story involving the bird pictures that I will share in a separate post someday):
I found the above frames in a giveaway box on the curb last year during student move out days. A photography student apparently didn’t want to take them with him wherever he was going. (I say “him” because there were a bunch of what appeared to be self portraits in the box, and the subject of them was a guy.)
But given that I want about 20 more frames, I needed a cheaper option. And Dollar Tree doesn’t carry a knockoff version.
However, when I was looking through the frames at my store today, I ran into one of my dream frames. It wasn’t wrapped and had no barcode on it. I brought it up to the front of the store and asked if they had started carrying this style. None of the workers had ever seen anything like it being carried there; they decided that a customer must have left it. So I ended up getting frames that look like this:
They are good enough for my purpose.
After I was done being rung up, the cashier pointed to the oddball frame and said, “You can go ahead and take that. None of us know what to do with it.”
And that’s how I got a free picture frame at the Dollar Tree:
