You know when you go to the store for two or three specific items and you come out with considerably more than what’s on your list? That happened to Mr. Burt and me today. Only usually when that happens, you also come out with considerably less money than you expected. Which is not what happened to Mr. Burt and me when we went to Albertsons this evening for onion powder, turmeric, paprika, and ground coriander, and came out with an additional twenty-one jars of spices.

Yes, you read that correctly: twenty-one jars of spices.

It all started when the only ground coriander we could find cost a whopping $6.29. As we had whole coriander in our spice rack at home, which has never been used in the six and a half years since we were given said spice rack for our wedding, it seemed like the thing to do was to buy a pepper mill and grind our own coriander. (Probably it should have seemed like the thing to do was to throw out six and a half year-old coriander, but this is a couple of cheapskates with compulsive hoarding tendencies we’re talking about.)

Problem being, there were no pepperless mills for sale.

But this wasn’t much of a problem, after all, as Albertsons was running a special on McCormick peppercorn and sea salt grinders. For the low low price of $1 (regularly $2.79), we could empty the black peppercorn from the grinder and fill it with our rancid old coriander.

We grabbed two, though looking back, we couldn’t tell you why we grabbed two. It was just lucky that we did, as, at the end of our transaction, the coupon printer presented us with a coupon for $1.50 off the purchase of two McCormick spices.

“Does that mean,” Mr. Burt said, “that we could buy two more of those black peppercorn grinders for fifty cents?”

I reasoned that it wouldn’t hurt to see, since we regularly cook with fresh ground pepper, so Mr. Burt ran back to the spice aisle for two more. Sure enough, after our coupon, they rang up for fifty cents.

And we got another of those buy two, get $1.50 off coupons.

Only this time I read the fine print, which stated that there was also the option of buying three McCormick spices and getting a $3.00 off coupon.

Mr. Burt’s eyes locked with mine.

He raced back to the spice aisle and got six more. We paid $1.50 for the first three spice jars and got a coupon to apply to the next three. Which came up free, not even requiring us to swipe a credit card, and still printed off a $3.00 off coupon.

“What the heck?” Mr. Burt cried through his hysterical laughter. “Can we now get infinite free peppercorn grinders?”

I shot a furtive glance at the Albertsons employee manning the self-checkouts, afraid he’d report us to a manager who’d kick us out of the store for taking advantage of this extraordinarily good deal, but he was laughing along with us.

“That’s the beauty of the self-checkouts,” he said. “Sometimes you hit the jackpot. It’s like your own personal Las Vegas.”

Mr. Burt and I had better not ever go to Las Vegas. Compulsive personalities, I repeat. With the permission of the cashier, we cleaned out Albertsons’ entire stock of peppercorn and sea salt grinders. (Conveniently, it was a number divisible by three.)

All told, we came home with twenty-one jars and only paid $4. We could have gotten them for $3, if we’d cottoned to the system earlier. Still, that was only $4 for $58.59 worth of pepper, pepper blends, and sea salt.

And at the end, there was another $3 off three coupon.We asked the cashier what we should do with it. He didn’t suggest we leave it for the next customer; he encouraged us to go to another Albertsons and clean out their stock. We didn’t, because the story was already funny enough.

Or was it?

In any case, we have more salt and pepper than we can use by the 2014 expiration date. If you need some, come to our house. You can have three–and our coupon.

(And if you were wondering, our little plan to use a pepper mill for our coriander fell flat, as the jars are constructed with non-removable tops. We didn’t notice anything missing from our steaks.)