Stories of the Street - Thirty two

Mary spends her days shopping.

She has almost no money so she has to be more than just “careful”. She has to employ cunning, extensive knowledge and careful judgement. There is also a bit of luck and a lot of stamina required to play her game.

Mary can travel free on public transport, so she has gradually expanded her sphere of knowledge and will turn up at a variety of different places depending on the day and the time. Often, she will have to wait until the market closes before she can obtain all the vegetables she needs to make one of her nourishing, three-day soups.

Sometimes it is a waiting game where she quietly rearranges a few items in the local supermarkets. This is what she has learned to call the long game. She picks items she really likes in the chilled food section and sometimes in the meat or vegetable section, too. She takes a couple of items which have been placed at the front of the shelf. They are due to be sold by the next day and she quickly places them right at the back of the shelf and stacks other packs in front of them.

Later in the day she will check to see if they have been brought back to the front of the shelf. If they have, she returns them to their hideouts. Another trip at the end of the day will either see them returned to the back or being marked down because they are very close to their sell-by date.

The trick is to make sure that some of your favourites are sold at knock down prices and that you are around at the right time to gather them in.

She knows which supermarkets and stores mark things down the most and she knows when they do their marking.

As a result, Mary spends as little of her money as possible on good quality, premium products.

Today, Mary is spending her time in what she calls “general browsing”. She does not want to spend any more on food until this evening. At seven PM this evening she will be in the local supermarket buying bread at a tenth of its normal price and she may even buy a cake or two for a similar knock down price. But today is going to be devoted to finding a new jacket. Despite the warmer weather, Mary is feeling cold. It is a sign of her age and a bloody nuisance but it is also a good excuse to trawl the charity shops.

The one on this street has an almost jumble sale feel to it. She would be hard pressed to tell you which charity it supports, but she knows most of the volunteers and has a good working knowledge of its stock. Before looking at the jackets, she spends a leisurely half hour studying the books and then she passes on to the selection of music; first, the long-playing records, then the tapes and finally, the CD’s. Someone recently give her a stereo which includes a working CD player and she has been collecting CD’s at a gentle rate ever since. Amazingly, the music she most likes is sold by these places for the lowest prices.

After picking up and considering two CD’s, she puts them back on the shelf and goes to the clothes racks. She wants to be sure she can get a jacket for the cash she has before she indulges in the luxury of classical music.