Ever go to the store to pick up 5 items and spend an hour because you had spent 10 minutes per item comparing the prices?

I have this compulsion to get the best price on the shelf for the item I’m buying. Of course stores recognise this and try to confuse you. One brand will list price per ounce and another will list price per serving. Even in brands where the price per serving is listed, both will have different serving sizes.

For example, the wife sent me to get some tomato puree. Great! There are about 8 different brands. On top of that theres canned tomato sauce and tomato paste on the same isle. So now I have to pick up all the different cans and read all the ingredients to figure out what the difference is. Some of the cheaper brands list corn syrup and either fructose/dextrose/maltose as ingredients. That just means they put 2 or 3 different types of sugar in to avoid having to list Sugar first as the major ingredient. Of course these need to be discarded. But then there’s still the problem of finding the cheapest per ounce from the remaining contestants. Of course at that point the difference in price is probably marginal but I still would like to see which product is truly cheaper than its competitors.

Does anyone else have these sort of “issues” or am I the only one who gets upset over buying tomato puree?

And what the hell is catsup?