Tax-Free Shopping

I am going on vacation soon and needed to do some clothes shopping. What is a vacation anyway without new clothes?!! Anyway, I decided to go shopping today, yes, today of all days, the start of the Tax-Free shopping weekend here in the state of Texas. To some of you out-of-staters this is not a big deal since clothing is not taxed in many states, but here in Houston, Texas we have a whopping 8.25% tax on everything.

When I go shopping there is pretty much just one rule I follow, well, there are more, but for this story only one rule applies. When I go shopping I am either at the mall when it first opens or one hour before it closes. I HATE going in the middle of the day, I hate driving around in circles looking for a parking space; I hate bumping into people at the stores and waiting. That is just me. I knew I had to be especially early today since all those people wanting to save $8.25 for every $100 were going to be flocking to the mall. I go to the mall at 9am and by the time I left at 11am there were no parking spaces left!!

People were buying anything and everything they could get their hands on. They were buying thousands of dollars in merchandise, at the mall thousands of dollars means a lot of clothes! I never knew the power of 8.25%.

Tomorrow is Baby Girl’s fifth birthday. In the afternoon I went to Target to try to get some last minute gifts for the baby guests. The store was also packed. While I was looking around in the toy section I heard a very interesting conversation. There was a mom shopping with her son and older daughter. The mom looks at an electronic pink piggy bank toy and says “I love that toy, too bad it is pink”. The older daughter asks her what she had said. The mom tells her how she would never buy anything pink for her son. Her daughter says “aren’t pigs pink?”