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EVEN before the cost of living pushed her to do so out of necessity, Waterford Mam Adrienne Sweetnam rarely left a hotel, restaurant, coffee shop or filling station without a pocket full of single serving condiments and spreads, WWN can report.
“If I’m in a hotel and there’s a breakfast buffet on, then that also counts as our lunch for the day,” Mrs. Sweetnam told us proudly, while displaying her collection of condiment sachets.
“Rolls in the handbag, a good handful of those butter packets – the Low low ones, not the real butter, they just keep longer. Some jam, maybe those peel-away Nutella yokes if they’re there… the kids would all say ‘ah mam, you’re embarrassing us’… am I embarrassing you with a free lunch later in the day when we’re on the beach?”
Mrs. Sweetnam learned her thrifty approach to self-serve stations from her own mother, and as prices in supermarkets show no sign of reducing, it has come in handier with every passing week.
“A bag of sugar costs €2. A fistful of tiny sugar pouches is free,” she explained, while lifting a fistful of wooden drink stirrers from the coffee dock of a Circle K, ‘just in case’.
Before we left, we were offered a plate of those biscuits you get after you give blood with a thick serving of Colman’s mustard on them, which we politely declined.