MARK MY WORD: FALLING SNOW DOESN'T DETER NEW CAR SHOPPERS

The white stuff makes people panic around here.

At the first hint of snow, area residents routinely race to the grocery stores to buy huge quantities of bread and milk.

Even people who don't regularly eat sandwiches or drink milk buy the stuff. Man doesn't live by bread alone, unless he's facing a snowstorm.

Judging by the empty shelves, it's the only thing they buy.

You can't buy beer or frozen dinners. It's just not allowed.

No wonder people are so crabby by the time a storm's over. They should have stayed at home and ordered pizza.

A colleague of mine has concluded that people buy bread and milk because we are a society of fast-food eaters who can't cook. So when we are snowbound, we have to resort to cold cuts and bread. What ever happened to a good pot of vegetable soup?

My friend, Bill, was stranded by an East Coast blizzard during a business trip to Washington, D.C., over the weekend. I hoped he was at a hotel that had plenty of milk and bread.

While everyone else was getting a milk moustache Saturday in Cape Girardeau, Joni and I were out car shopping.

After the transmission went out in our Honda last month and we discovered it would take a small fortune in a Swiss bank account to fix it, we decided we could get by with a single vehicle for a time.

We quickly learned how tough it is for a family of four to cope with only one car, even though it does open up some storage space in your two-car garage.

By Saturday, we were ready to fill up the garage again.

Joni and I went from dealership to dealership, trudging through the snow- and ice-covered lots to look at new cars.

You know you really want a car when you are standing outside on the frozen tundra of a car lot, scraping snow off a window to see the price sticker.

We took several cars for test drives. It's important to know how a car will steer in a blizzard.

The vehicles with good heaters, windshield wipers and heated side mirrors rated highly with us.

Buying a car isn't like buying anything else. It takes time. You have to negotiate.

If we bought groceries this way, people would still be haggling over the bread and milk long after the snowstorm had passed.

Car buying means that you spend 10 minutes driving a car and hours talking with a salesman and the dealership's finance manager about the weather, your children, their children and whether you will buy the car or take a hike.

You spend part of your time being shuttled from the salesman's office to the manager's office and back again.

The salesman and the manager can't speak to each other in front of you. This means that one of them is always leaving you alone in an office while he goes to the other end of the building to talk to the other member of the car-selling tag team.

After wrestling through the endless talking, waiting, talking and assorted paperwork, we bought a snow-covered Taurus.

We drove it directly home and parked it in the garage. Joni said she planned to keep it parked there until the snow melted and the bread and milk returned to the shelves.

That was fine with me. After all, we could always order pizza.

~Mark Bliss is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.