This  occurred to me on a recent trip to a local store to buy cooking pots - I won’t mention any names but they have 3 B’s in their initials. Normally I avoid big chains preferring to buy from smaller businesses, but my wife had $50 in gift cards (from a credit card reward or something)  so we headed there. We are replacing all our non stick pots in light of the possible health threat they pose.

The shopping part went smoothly and after looking at all the cooking pot sets we couldn’t afford, settled on a nice copper bottom 10 piece set for about the price of what a single high end pot would have cost.

As we were leaving we noticed a small sign on the display that the set included a free gift - ask at register or customer service. Well, a free gift always sounds nice but “ask at the register” translates into “you are about to waste a lot of time” in my experience.

Sure enough the cashier knew nothing about this, so someone from that department was paged to the register. He actually showed up after the second page (a small miracle in itself). He of course knew nothing about it either and headed back to his department to investigate. At this point I would have just left the store and bought it online, but my wife is like a hound dog trailing a scent when it comes to a “bargain” so I was forced to wait.

While he was gone we waited on line at the customer service desk only to find that they also knew nothing about it. So we went back to the department in search of the the person who went off to find the answer.

Eventually a manager was located who figured it out. The free gift was quite nice - a cast iron griddle. But time is money and as I figure it, by wasting 30 minutes of two adults time to get it - it would actually have been cheaper to just buy the griddle.

Is this an aberration? No, whenever I buy from a mass marketer I expect things like this. Which is why I prefer to buy from small businesses. When I purchase from a small business, I can expect to deal with knowledgeable people for the most part because good service is what keeps them in business at a time when mass marketers are cutting prices.  This applies to both mortar and brick businesses as well as online businesses.

Had I purchased my cooking pots  online I would have saved a lot:

• Time - the most valuable commodity on Earth. This includes both travel time (about 40 minutes) and the 30 minutes or so wasted while the store got its act together.
• Aggravation - incompetence really annoys me.
• Gas - I don’t know the actual milage but with todays fuel prices, 40 minutes of driving adds up to several dollars.

I know I only mentioned non stick coatings in passing  above.  There is a growing sentiment that under some conditions, non stick pots can release toxins into the air when heated. One of the symptoms said to occur is “flu like headaches” which I have been subjected to far more often than one would expect in recent years (we switched to all non stick cookware several years ago).  I am unsure how much of this is fact and how much is fiction so have decided on a safer approach and stopped using non stick pots and pans as a personal choice.