Winning the war.

Every Wednesday night, Dolores sits down at her dining room table, coupons and newspaper ads spread out before her. She makes lists and compares prices. Thursdays, she sallies forth to war, armed with coupons and lists and willing to go from store to store to get the best price. She’s been known to tell fellow shoppers, “You know, that item is 50 cents cheaper at such-and-such a store.” Friends are always telling me, “I ran into your sister in law at Wegman’s or Tops or P&C or Wal-Mart...” For me, shopping is the pits, a necessary evil to be dealt with. I shop at the Weedsport Big M. My goal is to spend as little time and money as possible in the store. I’ve found it’s wise to eat before shopping. My kids, when they lived at home, encouraged me to go to the store hungry, realizing more goodies showed up if I did.

Many years ago, I made out a list of standard items we needed to keep in stock, listed them in the order they were located at the Big M, then ran copies of that list. I worked off it for years. When the Big M added on to the store a few years ago and rearranged everything, my list was obsolete, so I trotted over there, inventoried the new location of items and made out a new list. Time well spent when you figure the hours I would save in the future.

My battle plan, admittedly juvenile compared to Dolores’: check supplies, mark what needs restocking, note what’s on sale, scoot to the store, race down the aisles, pick up the items I’m low on, stock up on sale items and get back home ASAP. This works unless you bump into someone you know, this factor being one of the hazards and pleasures of shopping locally.

The Weedsport Big M has been good to the Cichello family and, quite frankly, the Cichello family has been good to the Big M. I used to tell Tony Creme, Sr. that our family was putting his kids through college. That was in the days when I’d come through the checkout line with three overflowing carts. For some reason, shoppers avoided the line I was in.... Unless they had lots of spare time and were curious to see how much the total would come to! Sometimes, I get nostalgic for the days when they automatically opened another checkout line when I came into view. It happens only at holiday time now.

The Big M and I had an understanding back in the three cart days. If hamburger were on sale at a terrific price, I’d ask for 40 pounds and get it. If bread were on sale, I’d fill a cart with bread. We had three freezers in operation, an upright given to us by my parents when they moved into a smaller place, a chest freezer bought for $50 and another smaller chest freezer bought for $25. All would be full. Despite an unfortunate tendency on my part to forget what was in there, it still paid off. One of my proudest moments was back in the 1970s when I sent away for some shopping guidelines from the federal government and found out that I was feeding our household of 9 at below the poverty level. And they were eating well too! There were some rules in force at that time that the kids still reminisce about...You know, those stories that begin with, “Now when I was a kid....” The rules included such things as only- one-cold-cut- per two –slices-of bread, only 2 meatballs- per- person, 2 cookies-per- snack and so on. Some of the older ones still complain about the two youngest, when they were the only ones left at home, getting Ho Hos in their school lunches. “We never got those,” they whine.

For the last Cichello graduation party back in 1988, I asked Tony if I could use space in the Big M cooler and he agreed. If I’d only thought of that sooner! It’s much easier to reheat 40 pounds of chilled chicken wings than forty pounds of frozen ones! So for that party and a few others since then, I’d cook like a maniac all week, run the stuff to the Big M and Tony would store it until the day of the big event. There’s a lot to be said for small town living!

---Eileen Cichello

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