My cantaloupe story
A little off topic - but goes toward 'haggling' a bit.
I go to a food auction. Amish (and others) bring in their produce (and bakery - yum!) and sell via auction. About 9 months a year 3 times a week.
I used to go regularly and buy for a group of friends. Most of the auction was wholesale. You didn't buy a few pounds of apples or peaches - you bought 10-12 bushels at a time. No such thing as a dozen of corn. You bought it by the bags of 6 dozen a bag. A 'lot' might be 10 bags (so that's 60 dozen of corn!). When this auction company was getting this thing going, the prices were generally pretty low because not too many people knew about it. People started telling their friends so more buyers came out. The last few years the prices have been higher (which is good for the growers). Going to an auction is haggling at its finest!
In the earlier years, one time there were a huge amount of cantaloupes. They were everywhere. Prices were low! I bought a 'lot' of cantaloupe for 10 cents each. Can you imagine paying only 10 cents for a cantaloupe? There were 191 of 'em - a LOT of them! Had to call my husband to bring the trailer (it was during an 'important' baseball game - he wasn't too happy). Imagine - I paid $19.10 for that nearly 200 cantaloupe. They were in a large wooden 'crate' and were loaded onto the trailer with a fork lift.
I had a lot of fun giving them to people at church and neighbors. One of my friends in our group took 40 (she paid $4.00 for them) and sold 'em for 2/$1.00 by the road - sold out in 2-3 hours - she wished she had taken more. Another friend took a kid's wagon and walked around their neighborhood giving them away to their neighbors (what a delightful neighbor encounter). I got a lot of 'value' for that $19.10 and enjoy telling the story. I sold some too. Kids and I cut and froze some. Ate a lot of cantaloupe over the next week. Oh - they were DELICIOUS!
Here's a glitch to that - some of the later lots went for 5 cents a piece! Which goes to prove no matter how well you think you did haggling there's someone out there that did better! Did I pay too much?
GRIN!
The problem? I have a hard time paying regular price for a cantaloupe now - even a sale price!
