I went grocery shopping yesterday. That’s not particularly notable.

I forgot to pick something up while I was grocery shopping, which sadly is also not particularly notable. I have a history of going to the grocery store for two or three things and coming hope with a carload of items that weren’t on the list in the beginning but which caught my eye as I was roaming the aisle and oh look I kind of missed getting the stuff I actually went to the store for in the first place.

But.

My wife sent me a text today asking if I wouldn’t mind picking the thing up that I’d forgotten.

Unfortunately, it’s a particular brand of drink mix that’s only sold by one chain of stores, and the nearest one is a little inconvenient. I can make it there and do grocery shopping and get back on lunch, if I’m not buying anything perishable, but it costs me my entire lunch hour to do so. I don’t exactly mind doing it but I hate doing it more than once a week.

That’s when my natural laziness kicked in and I realized that this particular store is it’s a nation-wide chain and has a web site where it offers its various products for sale. It even has free shipping, if you order over 50 bucks worth of stuff.

Drink mix – even when you stock up on a few boxes – doesn’t come close to qualifying for free shipping, so I started throwing some other non-perishable stuff in the cart. Gum, snack chips, some granola bars, that kind of thing. Came out to about a dozen items, and I got my free shipping AND got to do the single laziest grocery shopping I’ve ever done. Order, enter credit card info, get the notice that I’ll be getting my stuff in a few days, done.

Then I took a closer look at the order summary page. I can’t be certain, but it looks like whatever software they use for order fulfillment is building my order from several different warehouses. If I read this summary right (and I dearly hope that I’m wrong), my grocery order of about a dozen items is going to be shipped to me in seven different packages.

So when the press release comes out from a Major Grocery Chain that they USED to offer free shipping, but had to stop because some jerk abused the policy…

…well, that was me. Sorry about that.