A few afternoons ago, I found myself in downtown Cincinnati for a meeting. After the meeting while heading to the bus stop to get a bus back to Kentucky, I decided to stop at the Walgreens at 4th and Main to buy a corkscrew.
I was having red beans and rice for dinner that night and had a bottle of red wine to go with it. In my move to Kentucky last year, somehow I lost my corkscrew. It was becoming a pain in my ass to get a bottle of wine open with a Phillips screwdriver. The best I could do with that thing was to make a hole big enough in the cork for some wine to drip out of the bottle. I decided it was time to move up in the world.
I went over to the wine section thinking they would probably have corkscrews nearby. They didn’t. I asked the clerk where the corkscrews were. She didn’t know, so she got on the phone and called someone else who works there. In about a minute, a guy comes to the counter with a corkscrew.
“We have two different kinds,” he said. “We have one for $3.99 and one for $5.99.”
I looked at the corkscrew on the counter.
“Which one did you bring me?” I asked.
“The one for $5.99,” he replied.
“Why did you do that?” I said. “Why didn’t you bring a sample of both of them for me to see or bring me the cheaper one?”
“This one is of a better quality,” he said.
“Yeah, and it cost more.”
”I thought you would want the better one,” he said. A bitter smile came to my face.
“If I wanted an expensive corkscrew, I would have gone to Williams-Sonoma, not Walgreens.”
The guy looked a little pissed as he walked away with the expensive corkscrew. He shortly returned with the one for $3.99 which didn’t look much different than the other one. I paid for it and left.
Standing waiting for the bus, it occurred to me that maybe I should have told the guy I was so cheap that I was actually using a Phillips screwdriver to open my wine bottles, but something tells me he wouldn’t have cared.
(Photo from Wikipedia)