Catherine Sherman

One of the six donuts from my “freebie” stash on National Donut Day.

It was National Donut Day and Freebie Friday. There were at least a dozen of us standing in the bakery area in a grocery store in my town, strangers but united in our passion for getting something free. We were waiting for our “freebie” half-dozen of frosted raised donuts with sprinkles, which we had earned or would earn by spending at least $25 in the store. It’s embarrassing to admit, but I had already been to another store in the same chain, but it had run out of donuts with no plans to bake more (no rain checks!). And I wasn’t going to buy a thing until I knew there were donuts to be redeemed, so here I was in the second store.

The baker in this store was baking more donuts. She said she had been completely caught off guard by the great demand. She’d already distributed about a hundred boxes of a dozen donuts. She had to bake, frost and sprinkle all of them. She said the next batch would be ready in thirty minutes. Thirty minutes! And yet most of us stayed. I did a little shopping, but what if the donuts came out and you weren’t there!

People were watching the bakery door as if we were waiting for royalty to appear. There she was! Everyone surged to the baker, including a woman who had just arrived on the scene and nabbed the first box from the stack of white boxes that the baker balanced in her hands. Line jumper! I was one of the lucky few. The baker promised the disappointed that more were coming out. She said she had already distributed 230 boxes that day.

One woman left for a few minutes, and when she returned, she saw the box in my cart. She bemoaned her fate. “I just stepped away for a few minutes.

The last thing I needed was a donut. I’m not even a fan of donuts. So why?

It must be in my genes to go after these freebies and bargains, though I’m not nearly as good or as devoted as my mother was.

My mother was an avid couponer and discount shopper. One of her favorite activities in her last years was to get the weekly “freebie” at her local grocery store. She accumulated points online to redeem the item that was offered for free every week. I wasn’t sure of the details, but I saw the rewards, because she handed them out to us. She also got discounted gas. Since she didn’t drive very often or very far, she offered the discount to her children from out of town.

On one of my visits to her many years earlier when paper coupons were widespread, I was just about to pull out of her driveway to go to the grocery store when she hurried out with three recipe boxes full of coupons, organized by category and expiration date. I had a recipe box like that, too, and almost never shopped without it. I’d hand coupons to my husband with his shopping list, and he’d forget to use them. They’d still be in his pocket when he got home.

Sometimes I’ve used not having a coupon as a reason not to buy something. When I took my two young children to the grocery store they would beg for sugary cereal. One child wanted to put a box of some luridly colored sugar cereal into our shopping cart. I shook my head and said “I don’t have a coupon for that.” My two children walked up and down the aisles and wouldn’t you know they found some coupons that someone had dropped, and one was for sugary cereal. Did I buy it? I think I had some other excuse not to. Maybe I said it was expired… Remember when coupons had no expiration date!

Now that we don’t subscribe to an actual newsprint newspaper, we don’t get advertising supplements full of coupons. I doubt paper coupons even exist in any significant amount. I don’t want sign up to each company’s website for discounts. I do belong to a few grocery store shopping rewards programs. Maybe that’s why when there is finally some discount or freebie I jump on it like a voracious weasel!

And today, I was going for a free 1.5 quart carton of ice cream, but when I paid, I was 46 cents short of the $25 when all of the sales discounts were subtracted. So horror of horrors I had to pay for the $3.99 carton of ice cream that I thought was going to be free. When the items were all rung on the digital cash register (self-checkout), I was a few dollars ahead, but the cash register didn’t ring up some of the discounts until after I checked out, which took me below the $25 threshold! I was robbed! Will I learn my lesson? Probably not.