In case you’re unfamiliar with what a Grocery Outlet is, let me give you a quick rundown. Grocery Outlet is a discount grocery store where everything is purchased wholesale from other grocery stores’ leftover stock. Each location has its own purchasing ability, which means each outlet will have some cross-over of items or have a slew of oddities and novel foodstuffs. At any given day, your choices could vary greatly or not at all from the day you last shopped at the same store.

In a word: unpredictable.

Shopping at Grocery Outlet is great because the costs are kept low, even for items that are normally very expensive. You can get (sometimes over) half off items that would otherwise be eye-watering in their cost prohibitiveness. This means your dollar goes further; no one complains about that.

The downsides, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, are that all of the items are second pick. The people at the “normal” grocery stores–Whole Foods, Costco, WinCo, Kroger–have already passed on the items that are displayed. Produce usually doesn’t involve the word “fresh” with it, meats are perfectly serviceable, if in packaging you’re no familiar with, and the boxes are banged up. Sometimes the things that are for sale are items you’ve never heard of before in your life; products so out-there that even the most hipster of people won’t touch.

Here is the biggest downside though: products that you got one day might not be there the next day. This means you need to prepare for heartbreak any time you step through those sliding doors. It’s this unpredictability that is the crux of this story.

My roommate and I have a (rather unhealthy) love for Pop-Tarts. While we disagree on what the best flavor is–he likes frosted strawberry, I like brown sugar–it’s our love for the sugary strudels that brings us together. Every time we go shopping, one of us inevitably asks the other to grab a box or two. The blue boxes have become a staple in our midtown apartment. It’s not great for our fat intake, but dammit are they delicious.

This near obsession is why we feel so devastated when we head into Grocery Outlet, seek out the treasure, and find that the store doesn’t have anything to offer us. We head back, relaying the bad news. It’s heartrending. You haven’t experienced pain until you’ve left the store without your precious Pop-Tarts.

Yes, we could go to some other store that routinely has them. I mean, the Target just down the street has a ton of flavors that we could buy, but nothing beats the value of Grocery Outlet. Ultimately, this is about principle. Not necessarily the acquisition of the Pop-Tarts, but the idea behind the Pop-Tarts. The achievement of getting the deal, the thrill of the strudel.

That’s really it. Just my thoughts on my daily struggle of getting the Pop-Tarts.