Grocery Store Danger Zone

Last week I was on the road, traveling for business, and today, I’m traveling again while my hubby holds down the fort at home. This meant that over the weekend, I had to go grocery shopping. Sending my husband, Dale, would have been too dangerous. Humorist Jeanne Robertson has it right. She has a hilarious 5-minute bit on YouTube called “Don’t Send a Man to the Grocery Store!”

Dale doesn’t grocery shop. He makes lots of trips to the grocery store, but this involves going in for a missing ingredient or two needed for that night’s dinner, and coming out with 40 items that weren’t on the list. Those 40 items are typically a collection of random ingredients and junk foods that do not go together in any way, and could never be used to pull together a real meal.

He’ll buy cornmeal, because he likes cornbread. He’ll buy the most expensive snack cakes in the store (guaranteed to be devoured by my boys in less than a day). He’ll buy a package of dry 15-bean soup to “cook stew”, despite having never made a stew in his life. We don’t even like stew!

Based on the peals of female laughter in that YouTube video, it seems that Jeanne and I are not alone. One wife asked her husband:

“Could you please go shopping for me and buy one carton of milk? And, if they have eggs, get 6.”

A short time later, her husband came back with 6 cartons of milk.

Puzzled, the wife asked, “Why on earth did you buy 6 cartons of milk?!”

He replied, “They had eggs.”