If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen sale

My wife got me to go to Ohio last weekend under false pretenses.

She said we were going to Greenville to visit her cousin and their family, and also to celebrate Annie Oakley Days — contrary to what some might believe, Annie Oakley is actually from that part of Ohio, was born there and is buried there, which is why they celebrate Annie Oakley Days.

But it turned out that neither of those was the real reason why Terry wanted to go to Ohio for the weekend — the real reason was a chance to shop for bargains.

Along with everything else it can boast, Greenville is home to the KitchenAid kitchen appliance plant — and their outlet store.

Their outlet store that was having their annual sidewalk sale as part of the Annie Oakley Days celebration.

We did take Terry’s KitchenAid mixer with us — the one that she somehow burned the motor out on, to see if it could be repaired. So I did know that a visit to the store was part of the plans for the weekend.

I was hoping, though, that it would simply be a matter of dropping it off for repairs, to be shipped back to us when it was done. I should have known better.

Put Terry in a kitchen appliance store and you’re in for trouble. Add a clearance sale — which was going on that weekend — and it’s time to run up the white flag.

The store had refurbished appliances on sale for anywhere from 25 to 40 percent of the full retail price for the same item, which meant that it was cheaper for her to buy a refurbished mixer than to repair her old one.

I would have been happy to swap out her old one for a new refurbished one, but Terry was far from ready to stop there.

She had a request from a friend to pick up a coffeemaker for her, which she did. But then Terry started calling up friends back home to tell them about the great deals and see if there was anything she could pick up for them.

Pretty soon she had more appliances than I could count — or we could fit in the car. Add to that the free gifts she was racking up with all her purchases and they had to put on extra workers just to haul all the stuff out to our car.

We had the trunk full of boxes, along with the back seat of the car, before someone told Terry that they would ship her purchases to us, free of charge. Apparently, she had bought enough stuff that she qualified for that extra perk as well.

It was a good thing, because at that point our next stop was to rent a truck to haul all her purchases home in. Either that, or one of us was taking the bus home while the other drove home in a car filled to the gunwales with boxes of kitchen appliances and gadgets.

Terry left her cousin in the dust when it came to buying, to the point that her cousin’s 12-year-old granddaughter, who was watching the Super Shopper in awe, made the comment that, “You know you’ve been at KitchenAid too long when you start calling it your second home.”

Mind you, this was still just our first day in Greenville. We still had another day to go.

By the time Terry was done, I think we qualified as major stockholders in the company. You may have heard on the financial news that KitchenAid declared an unannounced additional stock dividend after last weekend — now you know the reason why.

Terry insisted she was just stockpiling all the little extras and bonus items as Christmas and birthday gifts, but with everything she left Ohio with, she’s got birthdays and Christmases covered well into the next decade, if not beyond.

The next day was Saturday, which featured the big Annie Oakley Days parade through downtown Greenville. We met Terry’s cousin and her husband downtown for the parade, right across the street from — you guessed it — the KitchenAid outlet store.

Fortunately for our car and our bank account, the store had to close that day while the factory went on extra shifts to produce enough appliances to replenish their stocks, which had somehow been completely depleted.

Next week: We managed to do something else on this trip besides shop for kitchen appliances and gadgets — somehow.