October 8, 2004

Times FeatureMurray Frymer

The Pen-Ultimate Bargain

By Murry Frymer
Times Media Inc.

I am a dedicated bargain hunter. And as any bargain hunter knows, it does not really take much of a bargain to make it special to this obsessive mania.

For example. Rite Aid advertised three packs of ballpoint pens for a buck. Ten pens to a pack. I wouldn’t go across town for it, but Rite Aid is right next to the bank where I hoard my gains.

So I bought the three packs, 30 pens, for a dollar. And a day later, I opened the first pack and scribbled some note on a pad. Before I got through the first sentence, the ink ran out. What? I ran the pen all over the paper, but the ink never returned.

So I went back to the pack and grabbed pen number two. This one was better. I got through two sentences before the ink ran out. I shrugged and decided to give the pens some time to warm to their new accommodations. Obviously, they must just have been rusty from disuse.

The next day I was again writing a note and tried both of the pens that had failed. They failed again. Now, concerned, I went for a third pen. I wrote a few words. The ink began well but disappeared by word No. 7. What was this? A bad pack?

I ripped open the next pack and repeated the experiment with similar results. One of the pens actually wrote for a while, but eventually—more quickly than eventually— it, too, ran dry.

Well, it was only a dollar and I razzed myself for the bargain-hunting mania. But I had to make another trip to the bank in a few days and I told myself I would return the pens. Sure, it was more trouble than it was worth, but as anyone who has sought to save a buck will tell you, it was the principal that mattered.

So I returned to Rite-Aid and told the teenage girl at the cash register of my predicament. She looked at me with surprise. I was hoping she would say that many other buyers had returned their pens, but she did not. Instead she took one pen that I had returned and began writing with it. It worked perfectly.

“Well,” I said, “I could have figured they would work in the store. But they didn’t work in my house. No, they didn’t!”
She tried another pen. It, too, wrote well. I gnashed my teeth, feeling more than a tad foolish. But then the third pen she tried—she was a true experimenter—actually did not write well. “Thank God,” I muttered under my breath.

The young lady said she would have to check with her manager. Red-faced I waited by the cash register, watching the two of them murmering together. The manager eyed me suspiciously. Hell, I thought, why don’t I just take the pens home and hope for the best.

But then the young lady returned, as if she had just finished arguing before the Supreme Court. Yes, I could go and get three fresh packs. So I did and returned to the cash register, but not before seeing another bargain that was too good to pass up—a Timex digital clock radio with murmuring brook sounds to induce sleep. The sign said it was just five dollars!

The young lady looked at my pens. These were black ink, she said. The ones I returned had blue ink. “Does it matter?” I whined. She said she didn’t know, but would have to go check with the manager. When she returned I had passed the exam for the second time, though I had begun to wonder how I had fallen so low in my self-esteem.

She then rang up a $15 sale on the clock-radio. I pointed to the sign on the shelf and blurted: “It’s supposed to be five dollars.” The young lady pointed to the sign and said, with some world-weariness. “It’s five dollars OFF. The original price is $20.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, forget it.” I took the radio back to the shelf and reread the sign. The young lady was right. Sheepishly I tip-toed out of Rite Aid.

The thing about bargain hunters is the self-immolation that shopping trips may involve. I wondered if there was a Bargain-Hunters Anonymous club where you could go to fight the addiction. Well, if there was, I was sure I just didn’t want to meet any of the other miserable members.

On the way back to the car, to salve my wounds, I wandered into a Starbucks and got an iced mocha and a pastry, which cost $7. That probably wasn’t a bargain, but, well, I needed it.