Director of Procurement

In our house I wear many hats, one of which has to do with purchasing. I pretty much make sure that most of the day-to-day tangible needs of the members of my household are met. This includes buying food, personal hygiene items, cleaning supplies, and paper goods.

For the most part, I am a value shopper. I buy things on sale and stock up, I shop at multiple stores, I try (although I am way less successful than I could/should be) to clip coupons and I buy the store brand for most items.

That being said, there are some items that I can not compromise on and will only purchase specific brand name products. For instance, we I buy:

• Arm & Hammer laundry detergent
• Pampers diapers
• Bounty Paper towels
• Scott toilet paper tissue
• Bertoli tomato sauce
• Only "brand name" cereal

In some worst case scenarios, I will buy one of the aforementioned items out of necessity, requiring me to - gasp!! - pay full price. It hurts, it really does.

Recently my focus on thrift caused me to make a boo-boo. I bought the preferred type of Scott TP, but the one that was least expensive per square (using those handy dandy signs grocery stores use to share price information). Apparently that was my mistake.

Last night the Hoos called out, "Why did you buy industrial, commercial size toilet paper? It doesn't fit on the holder!"

The devil is in the details, I guess.