A Bird in The Hand

Posted by Nuzzling Muzzles

I love telling my marketing stories on this blog.  I went out to run some errands today, and my goal was to pick up some groceries at the market, and buy a new DuraFork manure basket at the feed store.  When I saw how bad the traffic was on the route I took, I knew I had to stop at the feed store first and take a less crowded route home. 

The feed store has had these DuraForks sitting out in front of their store for years, but I didn't need another one, so I didn't buy one.  Well, this past week I totally broke one of my DuraForks when I chucked it at my gelding to get him to stop biting my mare.  The fork hit him on the side, fell to the ground and exploded into plastic shards.  My gelding just looked at the fork in disgust and went back to biting the mare.  Ha ha.

So, when I went to grab a new DuraFork in front of the feed store, I discovered that they only had small baskets with short handles for kids.  Sigh.  I should have bought the big ones while they had them.  I ended up having to order a new one and will have to wait a few weeks for it to arrive.

Then I went to the market, but had some trouble parking, because these idiots from out of state kept driving up and down the aisles in the wrong direction, and they kept blocking me from being able to turn into the aisles from the right direction in order to pull into a parking space.  We have so many tourists in town now because of the holidays.

One of the items I needed was fat-free LactAid.  The past two times I went to a different store, they were out and I had to settle for some fatty LactAid or a different brand of fat-free, lactose-free milk.  This time I got the very last carton of fat-free LactAid, but I needed two cartons.  Since I've had problems obtaining it for three weeks now, the next time I find some in stock, I'm buying all of it, or at least as much as I can use before the expiration date. 

Then I remembered that the battery powered LED lights in my barn were dying and I kicked myself for not picking up some of those at the feed store.  Then I remembered that the market has always carried them too, so I headed to the lighting and hardware sections, but guess what?  They stopped stocking those lights.  Sigh. 

This theme kept following me throughout the store.  I kept getting into situations where I couldn't find what I needed.  I began cursing the fact that I live in a small town and began looking forward to moving to a location where conveniences aren't so hard to come by.  I grabbed a box of tampons off the shelf and tossed it in my cart.  Then I paused and thought, "Wouldn't it be horrible if this town ran out of tampons too?"

I grabbed several more boxes and threw them in my cart.  When I got to the register, the guy in line in front of me turned around, looked at all the boxes of tampons in my cart, and froze, as if stunned.  He couldn't take his eyes off them.  I could see the wheels turning in his head as he tried to figure out why one woman would need so many boxes of tampons.  Fortunately, he knew better then to look up at me, and just turned back around, keeping his head bowed to avoid any further embarrassment for either of us.