I Love The Half Price Card Store

Today I made my annual trek to the half price greeting card store on Hansen Street.  Unfortunately my bid to get Jess to go along with Test Number 1 was unsuccessful. 

Which is fine, I really didn’t think that plan through.  Oh man!  I was so young and naïve back in 2005!  Who knew I would become the grizzled wise man that I am today.

The whole point of that exercise was to never have to scramble to find a greeting card again but then I would have to offer a thousand bucks to my immediate family as well and that is just too cost prohibitive.

So what I do now is, once a year, I go to the half price card store and buy all my cards for the entire year.   Believe or not I still actually care what the card says, I don’t just take the cheapest ones and call it a day.  I was there for almost 30 minutes, which is an excruciatingly long time to shop for such things.  

There were a lot of duds to sift through.  But if you look hard enough you can find $4.00 or maybe even $4.50 sentimental dollar value for two bucks or less.   Don’t expect $5.00 sentimental dollar value though, it ain’t a Hallmark store.

I dump all these cards on the counter and the check out lady rings them up one by one.  The total was $54.  I’m thinking to myself, “holy shit, what a waste of money!” But then I forgot they take the discount off at the end so the total was $27.  I thought to myself, ”holy shit, what a waste of money!”  But still.  27 bucks.  That’s nothing to scoff at.

I had a hard time keeping a straight face when the checkout lady asked me if I came to the store often.  She wanted to give me a frequent shopper card.  I just bought a birthday card for my wife, for my mom, for my dad, for my brother, for my grandma, an anniversary card for my wife, and anniversary card for my parents, a Father’s Day card, a MOTHER’S DAY CARD, six money holder wedding cards, a stack of thank you cards, and what the hell, a baptism card because ya just never know when you are going to get invited to a last minute baptism party.

“Ummmmm.  I come here about once a year”.

I still took the frequent shopper card.  After my shopping trek next year, the punch card should be filled out so the year after that, I’ll get an additional 15% off.  So I got that going for me and son of a bitch I just realized I forgot to get a Valentines Day card and now I’m going to have to go back sometime between now and February well that’s just great.  Bring a checklist, fellas.

Another downfall of this strategy is that you will inevitably end up grabbing the wrong envelope for at least one card.  If you ever get a greeting card from me and the envelop is like twice the size of the card and the card is just jostling around in there, now you know.  This is a best case scenario.  Things get ugly fast when the envelope is too small.

Anyways, HAPPY BIRTHDAY JESSICA MY LOVELY WIFE!  I hope you like your birthday card this year;)