Rich People Discover Grocery Shopping

In this article about insufferable whining of Wall St. rich types, I found this paragraph that warmed my heart. He learned how to grocery shop!

“They have a circular that they leave in front of the buildings in our neighborhood,” said Arbeeny, 49, who lives in nearby Cobble Hill, namesake for a line of pebbled-leather Kate Spade handbags. “We sit there, and I look through all of them to find out where it’s worth going.”

...

He reads other supermarket circulars to find good prices for his favorite cereal, Wheat Chex. 

It's so cute! I wonder if any of them are poor enough to read little ol' Grocery Chopin.

C-Town Visit

My visit to C-Town resolved many of my problems.

 I got my Cafe Bustelo instant coffee for $4.99 like it's supposed to be! I got Bumble Bee Chunk white tuna for $0.99. It's regularly $2.09. I don't even ever buy it because I've never seen it so cheap. I restocked my tomato juice can stash because I had a weekend of a lot of bloody mary pitchers. And I got more vehicles for thousand island dressing. Oh, and the Cannellini were on sale for $0.80. Usually you see only black beans, kidney beans, and garbanzo beans on sale. Now I can make my tuna salad and enjoy lent.

Employees

Lately when I go to Associated, I am not shopping for much and that has been causing employees to ask me if I need help finding anything. The first time I was just trying to find something that cost about $1 so I could break a $20 bill so I could do laundry. Yesterday I was just checking the price of some coffee but I got a phone call and wandered around the store answering questions about signing up for Ally Bank.

After I checked the price of the instant coffee and found it to be $6.39 and wanting to find it be $5.49 or $4.99, I walked to the door. A cashier said "were you looking for something?" My first reaction was to tell the truth: "I was looking for Cafe Bustelo instant coffee that costs either $5.49 or $4.99, but you have it for $6.39," but instead I said "no, thanks."

Earlier in the day, some guy tried to sell me electricity from a different company by knocking on the door of my apartment and talking to me. I hate that and I'm not going to switch electricity because of a person. I'm sure he's trained to deal with objections people like me have, so I told him that I like paying higher bills to Con Ed. You can't argue with that. And then he left me alone.

I guess the moral of the story is that I'm nice to grocery store people and not nice to people who invade my time and space.

Dreams of Baltika

Last night I had a dream I was interviewing at Gourmet Garage and was asked why I love groceries so much. It was a very exciting dream. I talked a lot about a new commercial Pepsi had that compares how good Pepsi tastes compared to Baltika. I thought it was funny because Pepsi is the American distributor of Baltika. (None of that is true in real life.)

In real life, Western Beef raised the price of a bottle from $1.88 to $2. It's still a good deal for 51 oz of strong beer if you are ok with the taste.

My brain was apparently thinking about Pepsi's distribution deal with Stolichnaya vodka in the 70s which was how Pepsi got to distribute Pespi in the Soviet Union.

Grocery Violence

This is my Key Food. Well, I'm not the Foursquare mayor anymore. Whoever is taking care of it now is doing a bad job.

http://gothamist.com/2012/02/13/teen_fatally_stabbed_in_brooklyn_pa.php

Onions

I was just at Western Beef where they had a 2lb bag of yellow onions on sale for $0.79. I've never seen such a price. For comparison, loose yellow onions were $0.79 for 1 lb. That's what I call free onions.

Here is the best song I know about onions. It's by Lou Christie's sister. She's from Pittsburgh.