A gallon jar of Maille Dijon arrived at my house this week, and I want to be clear up front that I did this on purpose.

It is 9.05 pounds. It is roughly the size of a small dog. It came from Food Service Direct, the kind of wholesaler restaurants order from, and when Zach carried it in from the porch he held it like a bowling ball and asked, with what I felt was unnecessary judgment, what exactly we planned to do with it.

What we plan to do with it, folks, is eat it. Quickly.

This afternoon he looked at the tub sitting on the counter, where it has loomed since it arrived, and said, “I thought you were joking. You weren’t joking.” I was not joking.

Here’s the thing nobody warns you about a Dijon habit; it sneaks up on you. Zach has a sandwich every single day for lunch, and a sandwich without mustard is just sad bread. I have a couple of sandwiches a week. But the real consumption is the cooking; a scoop goes in my salad dressing, a scoop in the coleslaw, a scoop in anything that needs that vinegary, spicy, sour pop that only Dijon brings. (Once you start using mustard as a seasoning instead of a condiment there is no going back, and your jar count will reflect that.)

So I did what any reasonable person does when they suspect they have a problem; I ran a cost analysis instead of addressing it.

We go through a 7.5 oz jar in about ten days. At Publix that jar runs around seven dollars. Ordering the same jar from Amazon with free shipping gets it to about six. The gallon tub was thirty-five dollars plus fourteen for shipping, so forty-nine all in, and it holds roughly nineteen jars’ worth of mustard. That comes out to about two dollars and sixty cents per jar-equivalent, against six or seven for the retail jar. Call it sixty-five to eighty-five dollars saved per tub; and since we burn through something like two tubs a year, that’s well over a hundred dollars a year. On mustard. I have feelings about this and most of them are smug.

The obvious objection is whether a gallon of mustard goes bad before you finish it. It does not. Mustard is functionally immortal; it’s vinegar and ground seeds and a bad attitude, and it keeps in the refrigerator basically forever. We’ll be through this one in a bit over six months regardless, which is well inside any reasonable window. The only real cost is shelf space, and we will get to shelf space.

Because the mustard is not, if I’m honest, an isolated incident.

The mustard came from a food-service supplier, which is the most extreme end of how we shop. But a lot of what we use regularly comes from Costco, which is bulk-adjacent without being restaurant-scale; Grillo’s pickles (which I would absolutely buy by the food-service case if we had the refrigerator room; we keep a small drinks fridge out in the garage, but it is not a full-sized one, and a case of Grillo’s is not a beverage), Kirkland olive oil, and a rotating handful of staples we go through fast enough to justify the size.

And then there is the BOGO problem. I am constitutionally incapable of walking past a good buy-one-get-one, which is how we currently have eight boxes of Grape-Nuts in the reserve pantry. Eight. We do not eat Grape-Nuts at a rate that justifies eight boxes; we eat them at a rate that justifies, optimistically, two. But they were nearly free, so they live under the stairs now, in what I have generously named the “reserve pantry” and Zach less generously calls “the cereal bunker.”

Here’s where I want to be honest, because the buy-in-bulk-and-save gospel skips a part. Bulk only saves you money if two things are true; you actually use the thing fast enough that it doesn’t expire or go stale, and you have somewhere to put it. Both of those are quietly expensive in their own right. Floating forty-nine dollars up front on mustard assumes you have forty-nine dollars to float. The Costco run assumes a membership, a car big enough to haul it, and the gas to get there. The reserve pantry assumes you have a space under the stairs to begin with. None of that is free, and none of it is available to everybody, which is worth saying out loud before anyone takes my mustard math as universal financial advice. (It is not financial advice. I am not a financial advisor. I am a woman with a gallon of Dijon.)

That tension, the real economics of bulk buying and storage and who actually gets to play that game, is a bigger conversation than one Thursday post can hold, so I’m giving it its own deep dive down the line. For now, just know that the gallon jar is real, the math checks out, and the cereal bunker is accepting no further deposits.

P.S. Yes, I considered whether nine pounds of mustard was a cry for help. I decided it was a cry for sandwiches.

P.P.S. Zach has requested I note that he did not vote for the gallon jar and accepts no responsibility for it. The record will show he has used it twice a day since it arrived.

P.P.P.S. If you also have a cereal bunker, a mustard situation, or an under-the-stairs shame shelf, tell me about it in the comments. I need to know I’m not alone.

P.P.P.P.S. I am lobbying, gently and constantly, for a full-sized refrigerator in the garage, which would make the food-service Grillo’s dream a reality. Zach is holding firm. The man bought a gallon of mustard’s worth of storage problem and draws the line at one appliance. Negotiations continue.