Frugality and excess, lethal combination

Shopping a Costco, BJ's or Sam's Club brings out two emotions that normally don't surface together: frugality and excess. That's the only way to describe a purchase of a 5 lb bag of baking soda or a 5 lb tub of fake cheese spread.

The normal person wouldn't use up the baking soda in a life time of deodorizing refrigerators and we all know the toll at the scale if someone ate up a tub of lard, um I mean fake cheese spread.

But the baking soda, the fake cheese spread along with gigantic sacks of cheezie doodles and thousands (4,000 items to be exact in a Costco) of other gigantically packaged items, are inexpensive and most of the time, down right cheap. Too cheap to pass up as American pantries filled to the gills will attest to.

We neither feel deprived by our frugality nor guilty about our excess, brilliant merchandising.

Yes one needs to scour one's sink, then 6 containers of Comet it is. The thing is, I keep a kitchen and 2 bathrooms pretty clean, I can't remember the last time I bought a container of Comet. And Comet is what I use at least once a week in all of these rooms.

But we have to find these values or - better said - we have to find the items in these stores valuable, don't we, to make up for the annual membership fee. It's $50 at Costco. Seems odd to pay for the privilege of shopping, anywhere.

You're in a situation where saving money is dependent on spending money. That can impair your judgement. It's impulse shopping that's not a buck for a pack of gum at the cash register.

I've concluded that buying less will cost more per unit item but less for what you really should be using.