My devotion to the sale table

Up in front of our local Ingles supermarket, next to the last register, there's a sale table where they clear out merchandise they're no longer going to carry (or that has been discontinued). As such, it's bittersweet. If something's on the sale table, the party's over; I'll have to buy it in Athens or Atlanta--or at least down at the lake where the rich people live--forevermore. But still, I'm a big fan of it. My tastes are different enough from most people's that I tend to like the selection very well indeed.

Examples of things I love that I've found there:

• La Croix sparkling water
• Sun & Earth environmentally friendly dish and laundry detergents
• Ghirardelli dark chocolate chips (this is how I first started buying them)
• Lyle's Golden Syrup (which I am astounded that they carried in the first place, but boy did they ever...I've already bought one can of it and may buy another, because about 20 of them are still sitting there)
• Kashi brand organic Strawberry Fields cereal
• Gold Medal all-purpose flour packaged in the plastic resealable pack (I assume this aggravated them because it didn't fit on the shelf with the normal-shaped flour bags)
• the 96-oz. size of Pompeiian extra-virgin olive oil
• tins of smoked mussels, smoked oysters, and sardines

All very good things indeed, n'est-ce pas?

Sometimes it's not the end. This week I got a large carton of vanilla soymilk for 99 cents because it was approaching its expiration date. The same happened with three-packs of single-serving aseptically packaged "Li'l Milks" not too long ago.

The sale table is good to me. If it weren't for the caprices of the Ingles store manager, I wouldn't be sitting here drinking my coffee with vanilla soy milk this morning. That's something I never thought I'd do, being a dairy devotee, but you know what? It's actually really good.