PJP Was Here...
Earlier this week, we were tipped off to an amazing sale at Hy-Vee...Land O'Lakes butter for $2.99 a pound and evaporated milk for .88 cents a can. And believe it or not, those are much better prices than our food broker is able to offer this week. Because those sale prices end today, first on our agenda this morning was to stop by and basically buy all the butter and all the evaporated milk. We planned to shop even before we had our morning mochas from Caribou, so you know this was some serious business, INDEED. This may not surprise you, but people look at you oddly when you load 100 cans of evaporated milk into your cart. I have a whole new respect for those Extreme Couponers because finding the deals and loading the deals into your cart and keeping track of how much you have of a product in your cart while others look on is well, it is strange. Once we secured the evaporated milk without incident for the hundreds of pumpkin pies headed our way in the next week, we headed straight for the butter.
Remember that butter is the very heart and soul of PJP. And here is the thing about butter...the market price fluctuates wildly. I have no idea if there is some sort of National Board of Butter or how the pricing is set, but it can only be by a complex formula that takes the number of sticks of butter sold in America in one day divided by the number of people who simply thought about butter times the number of people who think Country Crock might actually be butter. I can't think of any other explanation for the wild swings in butter pricing and so when Hy-Vee announced $2.99 for Land O'Lakes, we said, YES PLEASE.
Which is how we ended up with this picture...
As you can see, we wiped the stock clean. If you wonder about those Land O'Lakes boxes to the right in the picture, those are what Land O'Lakes calls "LIGHT BUTTER" and clearly, that product won't be joining the PJP party. And in case anyone was on the hunt for the $2.99 special on the Land O'Lakes butter, well, we felt we should leave a note to make everyone else who came along after us aware that we take responsibility for emptying the stock.
After checking out with about $300 in dairy items, Jeanne decided that simply pushing the cart back to PJP Buttonwood would be far superior to standing in the freezing cold and unloading the butter and milk into my car, driving to PJP, and then unloading the car and carrying it all into the store. So she did what any sane(ish) person would do...she pushed the cart to PJP. I drove along side her at a snail's pace and with my window down, like we were training her for some sort of bizarre running event.
While all this was going on, a woman drove by and looked at us like we had lost our minds...or stolen all of Hy-vee's butter. While I drove around to the front, Jeanne went to our back door and knocked. Our two employees - Mac and Mitch - opened the door and didn't even question us...they just rolled the cart right into PJP...
We unloaded everything and returned the cart like it was just any normal PJP day. And perhaps that is why I love PJP so very much...no one's normal day starts with buying 50 pounds of butter and pushing it in a grocery cart through a massive parking lot on a cold fall morning. Except ours. Sounds legit.