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You say all-you-can grab shopping spree at the liquor store presided over by a dancing chicken mascot in a one-piece bathing suit and we say, to quote from James Joyce’s Ulysses, “yes I said yes I will Yes.”
The second annual “Dirt Cheap Party Sweep” is coming up on June 9; the liquor-store chain has just announced the close of the raffle for entrants. Fourteen lucky winners (one for each Dirt Cheap location in Missouri, plus an online entrant) will soon be chosen and invited to race through the liquor store one at a time, grabbing booze, mixers, soda, etc. from a checklist of 20 to 25 items, said company spokesperson Lisa Merlotti. You can watch a video of the action here.
The competitor who grabs the most items in three minutes gets to keep them. Everyone else gets, as they say, some nice parting gifts.
We here at Relish think a lot – too much, some might say – about all-you-can-grab shopping sprees. We explored the topic here, when Whole Foods of Brentwood offered a shopping spree to celebrate its tenth anniversary, a few years back.
Logistically, the Dirt Cheap competitors will be told which location they’ll be running through, so they can go there beforehand and get the lay of the land. “This is our second year doing the Party Sweep,” said Merlotti, “and last year some of them did strategize and go to the store and scope it out first.” At the end of three minutes, the items in each competitor’s cart are tallied; that means there’s no need to race back to a finish line. Also, the store will be closed to all but the competitors, so they won’t have to dodge Joe Sixpack as he shops for a six-pack.
The winner of last year’s inaugural Dirt Cheap Party Sweep was Amanda Noble of Arnold. Shockingly, she only needed to procure eight or nine items, she said, to win.
The particular challenge of the Party Sweep is that the Sweepers must grab “exact milliliters and brands,” said Noble. “The list will say like a 750 milliliter bottle of liquor, and which flavor. You couldn’t just grab any bottle of vodka. I was very surprised it only took eight or nine items to win, but people picked up the wrong thing and it didn’t count.”
“I got the Gummi bears and Red Bull first. That was what I knew,” she said. “Then, everything that you think you’re gonna do goes out the window. I had this plan about sticking to one side of the store first but you get into a mad panic and run for anything you recognize.”
“The gin and the vodka are really tough,” she added. “When you’re in a hurry it all looks the same. There’s like 100 different kinds of vodka. Wine was hard, too.”
From her take-home boodle, she said, the item that meant the most to her was a humble six-pack of Bud Light, “but the most valuable was the big bottle of Crown Royal, which I re-gifted to my mother,” she said.
Understandably, through her adventure Noble developed tender feelings for the Dirt Cheap chicken.
“I love the chicken,” she said. “He’s awesome. I wanted to have the chicken at a catered event but the chicken was already booked.”
We are living vicariously through these lucky contestants as they race through the liquor store and toss jugs of vodka and Bloody Mary mix into their shopping carts, emerging to the silent applause of a chicken mascot. Samuel Beckett himself could not have drafted a more absurd comment on existence.
Being a real St. Louisan means listening to the Cards on the radio while tossing washers (pronounced “wershers”) in the backyard. It means winding up a summer night at White Castle and/or Ted Drewes. And it means making peace with goofy local mascots like the guy in the gorilla suit at Home Furniture in Collinsville (“Where there’s no monkey business”), “Sharky” the shark of the St. Stephen Protomartyr Lenten fish fry (left), and the Dirt Cheap chicken and her plaintive warble, “Cheap Cheap, Fun Fun.” It would be foolish to try to distance ourselves from the chicken; she is every bit as “St. Louis” as Beatle Bob, Steve Mizerany, Pete Parisi, or the St. Louis Steamers soccer cheerleaders, aka the “Steam Heat Dancers.”
We are the Dirt Cheap chicken, and she is us.
Fun, fun?
Yes, chicken-friend. We say yes we will Yes.
