No question about it, in my house, shopping is a chore. And like most of my chores, I do it as infrequently as humanly possible. That has its plusses and minuses. The plus is I can live in a state of serenity between episodes of shopping. The longer the better. The minus is the longer I put it off, the worse it is when I must relent and do the deed. If you wait five years before buying your next pair of jeans, $75 comes as a shock.
It was the same when I signed up for last weekend’s Historical Novel Society conference. It’s been roughly 40 years since I attended a conference — the kind where you pack your bag and book your flight and hotel. Talk about sticker shock.
As is my wont, I will complain (and to make it worse, I whine when I complain) mercilessly when I come up against outlandishly high prices. I will find a way to fit it into every conversation. No one comes away unscathed. But, because I am a mature adult, I told myself that the minute I boarded the plane for the conference, I would not say one more word about the price of anything during my stay at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.
Guess how long that lasted?
I was keen to try out their pools. Five of them, all between 80 and 85 degrees, and none more than four feet deep. They’ve even got one with a blackjack table in the middle of it. Right next to the bar. So that was cool. And if you wanted to, you could rent a poolside cabana for $1,000. I trust that’s for the whole day. I never said a word.
After our swim session, we went back to the room, and once there, I was reminded not to open the minifridge. If you so much as open it, that’s going to set you back $85. And if you touch an item, it’s going to cost you. A lot. I said not a word.
By this time, I had been at Caesars for four hours, and not one whine. I must have been overconfident; either that, or I wanted to test myself, because on our walk through the casino to the opening reception, I stopped outside the Amalfi restaurant to read their menu. 100 freaking dollars for a steak. Or maybe it was $82, and it was the restaurant around the corner that was $100.
That’s all it took — $100 steak — to release my pent-up sticker shock whine. $100 for a steak is a huge investment. And with each bite, my investment shrinks. Needless to say, I had to search for another place to eat (dinners were not included in the conference price) and thought the Bacchanal Buffet might be reasonable. Yah, right. It was $91 for the buffet. Per person. And the place was packed. But not with me.
My worries about fading away to a shadow because of sticker shock were all for naught. The evening receptions featured hors d’oeuvres that I treated like a buffet of my own. Fill my plate, sit down at a table, chit chat, finish plate, refill, sit down at a different table, rinse and repeat.
The best things in life are free. Or at least included in the conference price.
Elvis is in the house …