supermarket stampedes

Everyone loves a great bargain, right? A couple of weeks ago Globus, one of our big stores here in Prague, was having crazy mark downs. The 1.5 liter bottles of the mineral water that we drink had suddenly been marked down from 11 crowns each to 6.50 each. So to "cash in" so to speak, I made at least 3 trips to Globus and picked up dozens of them, all of which I hauled home on the metro and the bus. Then they marked down liter cartons of orange juice from 20 crowns to 10 crowns each. So similarly, I bought about 30 of them. More money saved. Cooking oil was then marked down from 30 to 18 crowns. Take a wild guess what I did if you can.

The most fun was watching people buying up the stuff like there was no tomorrow. It somewhat reminded me of all the y2k hysteria that preceded the end of 1999. This morning I had a similar experience. We normally buy a cola at our Lidl supermarket called Freeway Cola which is made in Poland. It costs about half what Pepsi or Coke costs, but I honestly can't tell the difference between it and Pepsi. This week Lidl decided to mark down Pepsi to the same price as Freeway. Hence this morning when I went to Lidl originally intending just to get a bag of flour, people were in there fighting over the Pepsi. I picked up a pack of 8 2 liter bottles and quickly proceeded to the checkout.

Was all of this silly on my part? I suppose it was, but I figured since we would eventually buy these groceries anyway, it made sense to stock up while they were cheap so that when the prices go back up after the sale ends we won't have to pay double for them again.