Thursday, February 17, 2011

Take on Shampoo

Almost 15 years ago when I first moved out of my parent's house into my own apartment my life changed.   I lived on my own schedule, paid my own bills and bought my own groceries.   Now paying for groceries kind of sucked but my roommate at the time was about the best shopper you'd ever met.  It was like he'd run through the aisles like he was competing on an episode of Supermarket Sweep except he got extra points for finding deals.    He would find things on sale in the paper, he'd clip coupons, he'd find two-for-ones and he'd buy in bulk but he'd always get a good deal.  He knew which day of the week to go and buy cold-cuts cause when the supermarket was most likely to discount the cheese, we'd feast on London Broil because you the most bang-for-your-buck, we'd get the 75% lean ground beef which he proved actually tasted better,  he showed me that buying generic spices was a great way to save money and he'd always look for the dented pasta cans.  But where he really sold me was when he told me that there was no difference in shampoo and that we should just buy the least expensive thing on the shelves.    We searched high and low (mostly low) and found bottle of Suave which came in every color of the rainbow (or at least every color of the Gatorade rainbow) and we were off.
I have been using the cheapest shampoo I can find ever since and never had a complaint.  never up until about 3 months ago when for the first time I started to notice something….specks of white on my black shirts…then I started seeing flakes of snow in my hair even when it wasn't snowing and finally I'd see it rain onto the screen of my IPhone whenever I read on the subway..    
It was like I all of a sudden turned into an old man overnight with cranky knees, a crabby attitude and an itchy scalp which you'd think was bad enough until I got another swift kick to the unit when I walked into Duane Reade and dropped $5.99 for a small bottle of Head and Shoulders.

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