Sad but true very often. Yea, being a consumer is hard, what with trying to get what it is you want/need in life, all the while trying to not break the bank. And sometimes, though rare, you manage to do both. Rare of course being the key operative here.

Case in point, a recent trip to Ross. Yes, that Ross. The dress for less peeps, the ones that apparently take clearance stuff from other places that’s way out of season. Well fall is upon us, and where I live now, Fall & Winter are closely linked. It’s getting chilly at night, and though I sleep like a champ once I’m there and tucked, warm & content, the initial shock of cold sheets against naked body was becoming a little more than I could handle. So we figured maybe flannel sheets were in order. Yes, I said naked, now just drop the mental image and move on.

We get to Ross early on the off chance they might have in-season stuff at the out-of-season store, and imagine my surprise when right in the front on display was a boatload of flannel sheets. Who knew, right? Which is probably why they had them up front, because no one would ever expect winter items near winter time at Ross. So we start digging through, looking for a Cal King set that we were pretty sure we would not find in Ross, on clearance, in a big “throw it all in there” display. Imagine our surprise when we find a set, and behold, it’s only $15. Yikes, this is great news, right?

We figure we’ll take a look around some other stores (oh yeah, we’re at a mall, btw) before we jump in for the $15 ride. Well, we passed through every place we could think of, but $15 sounded better than all the $40-$70 price-tags we kept seeing elsewhere.

And let me reiterate, you often get what you pay for. This was an example of that rule. We paid $15 thinking we were getting flannel sheets, but more specifically we got flannel explosion. Yeah.

And I swear we washed them first. We fitted them, then washed to get the lint and whatnot off. We put them on, and notice a lot of lint sticking to our comforter. But it’s late by this time, after 11pm or so and I’d just gotten off of work, and I’m tired and need to be at work early in the morning. Screw it, lint or no, I’m a trooper and I’m going in.

Maybe not the brightest idea, but in my defense, it was late and I was tired and probably not thinking my clearest. We got up in the morning. What did we wake to? It looked like a bunny exploded under our comforter. No, make that 3-4 bunnies. 3-4 cute, khaki-colored bunnies, all dead and spread out over my inherited Cal King bed. Thank goodness the comforter had sacrificed itself to save its friends – um... floor & curtains – by throwing itself atop the blast. It could have been much worse.

We learn quick ‘round here
This has been another quality example of the “you get what you pay for” mantra, and I think that this time I will bother to learn from it. We’ve done this dance before, and quite a few times just recently: A) we bought some cheap kitchen food containers, because $10 seemed much cheaper than $20 for the airtight ones. Until the ants came that is, and we bought the airtight ones anyway. B) We bought a cordless phone for our new home. But we didn’t see any reason to pay more than the $60 necessary to buy the cheapest one at Target that had the minimum of what we were shopping for. That is, until we actually tried to use it and realized that one wall & 20 feet was all it took to make it more of a cordless fetch toy than a cordless phone. C) We bought a cheap plastic water nozzle for the outdoor hose (I specify outdoor because we do indeed have hoses inside. Don’t ask), because we didn’t want to spend $4 extra for the metal one that seemed like it was almost the same thing. That is, until we used the plastic one and found out that it did not have a return spring, so we had to pull it off, rather than simply release the handle, and the little “stay-on triangle thingy” thing didn’t actually fit where it was supposed to, so you couldn’t lock it in the on position either. Then of course, we had to buy the one we should have bought first a few weeks later anyway. Work gloves? Same thing. Work shoes for the girl? Same thing.

All this buying the cheap one first then buying the good one second is really killing the pocketbook. I’m all for not being taken to the cleaners – unless I'm dirty – but I think the sheets are the last time we do this song & dance. I can’t dance better than the average white guy by the way, so any way I can avoid it the better, and I’m willing to pay extra for the convenience.

We took the sheets back (“These sheets, um… aren’t the right size….DON’T OPEN THE BAG!”), then we price checked only the stores we felt had merchandise of reputable quality (read: $40-70 sheets). We decided on what we found at Mervyn’s, which as you might have guess was the $40 variety, though only in a way. They were $50 the days before, but had gone on sale so we jumped. These sheets? Red. Scared? You bet I was. Need I have been? Not really.

A few small stray pieces of lint, but they’ve worked out well so far otherwise. Even through a small “break-in” session. Yeah baby. I’m all about the visuals & mental images tonight!

So anyway, take it from me. The saying? It's pretty damned accurate. Research the product. If you find a price that's too good to be true, it is. It's not really [insert product here], it's actually [insert the word "crap" here]. And that's just the way it is.

Peace.