Too Many Points? Try Your Hand at the Weshop Bulk Catalog [Updated]

Navigating through thousands of different product descriptions is a pain, but it’s ultimately worth it if you want to maximize what you get out of the campus grocery.

As of yesterday afternoon, all our WesCards are working again. That means that now, I can stroll into any campus dining establishment to use any number of the now 1,827 points I have. 1,827!!! What on earth am I going to do with all these points? Why do I have to pay for them every semester when I know that I’m definitely not going to be able to use all of them? (I am a small person and do not eat very much.) These are not questions that concern you.

What may concern you, though, is that you can use your points to order from the ~*~Weshop bulk catalog.~*~ Basically, if you want things that Weshop doesn’t normally sell in the storefront, like dried beans or 2-pound bags of rice, and if you want them in considerably larger quantities for considerably cheaper than it would be to buy the tiny packages once a week every time you run out, the bulk catalog has you covered.

It remained an elusive paper copy deep in the office annex of Weshop until last fall, when the kind people of Bon Appétit put it online for us to use. kg discovered in 2015 that she could order her diva cups through the bulk catalog. Some other gems include children’s multivitamins, something they’ve labeled only as “DRINK,NATRL STRSS RELIEF,” condoms, and brewers yeast for all you people who try to make your own alcohol.

The full catalog list is HERE, and the order form is HERE. Since the order form is view-only, a good way to fill it out is to copy it to a new spreadsheet in your drive doohickey and then fill in all the values there.

You may ask, “But how do I use it? How do I navigate this list of 24,000 different purchasable items??”

I’m not lying about that. There are literally thousands of things you can order from this list. I think it’s a bit excessive. In a fit of mania this morning, I very seriously considered buying two gallons of shoyu, just because I could. But don’t do that unless you really think you can go through two gallons of shoyu. Try to be reasonable with it, yes?

So when you open the spreadsheet, it’s probably going to be a bit overwhelming. The easiest way to navigate the catalog is to hit control+F and search for what you’re looking for. A casual perusing of the Weshop bulk catalog will likely take you hours, so I strongly recommend that you know what you’re looking for when you plunge yourself into the belly of the beast.

Just ask yourself: What do I use a lot of normally? How much of this food item can I reasonably go through in one semester? (i.e., can I really use a gallon of peanut butter?) Will I be able to carry all of it back to my dorm?

The order deadline for each week is Tuesday night, for orders to be delivered the following Thursday. If your order comes out to less than $50 (with the included 30% bulk order charge, which seems bad but isn’t really that bad when you consider how expensive Weshop is otherwise), you can just email it to weshop[at]wesleyan[dot]edu. If it’s more than $50, you have to prepay, so print out your order form and take it to Weshop with you the next time you go.

Another side note: our Points Calculator is back up and running again for the spring semester. If you have rollover points, you can still enter them to see how many you can use each week for the rest of the semester, but it will do this passive-aggressive thing where it tells you that it’s “not a valid number of points” and say that you’ve used negative infinity per week so far. I don’t know how to fix that, unfortunately.