Saturday, June 02, 2007
(8:22 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
A Mainly Consumerist Post
- Why is cereal so damn expensive lately? I used to be able to get my beloved Frosted Mini-Wheats for $2 a box on a fairly regular basis, and now I'm thrilled if I only pay $3.
- Brad and I were discussing it, and it seems that Chipotle has been pulling the wool over our eyes for all these years -- the rice in the burritos is so obviously filler that I'm embarrassed that I didn't think of it earlier. If they replaced the rice with equal amounts meat and beans, we would be dealing with a burrito of world-historical proportions. Instead we get the bizarre spectacle of a burrito that causes, of all things, constipation.
- My bank doesn't appear to have any ATM's in my neighborhood, so I'm slowly being bled dry by fees. One nice thing, though, is that there's an ATM that actually has ones, fives, and tens -- normally I'll get out $38 (to make the overall withdrawal a round number), and all of a sudden I'm the heroic guy with exact change at the restaurant.
- Yesterday I went out for my customary walk, and my mind wandered to how far I had walked. Since I always walk down Lincoln Ave., one of the handful of diagonal streets in Chicago's otherwise brutal grid, calculating the distance involves an application of the Pythagorean Theorem. Thinking through various routes I normally take, I realized that, just off the top of my head, I knew the square roots of 2 and 3 out to three decimal points (1.414 and 1.732, respectively). To my knowledge, I had not given any thought to the topic of the decimal equivalent of square roots since my senior year in high school.
- At the grocery store yesterday (an active day!), all the baggers were busy helping old people buying approximately 5,000 cans of vegetables, so the cashier herself bagged my groceries as I fiddled with the credit card thing. I have long been of the opinion that the art of grocery bagging is in serious decline, with most baggers apparently being trained to use as many bags as possible and threatened with immediate termination if they put more than two items in the same bag. This time, however, I got one of the best bagging jobs I've gotten in my life. Even back in my grocery bagging days, I rarely attained such a high level of bagging quality. I think I'm in love.
- Now that I think about it, one of the few other times I've gone through her line, the guy bagging my groceries, who was apparently mentally disabled in some way, was repeatedly calling her a "cutie." So perhaps developing bagging skills was a survival mechanism. She is pretty good-looking, and by the standards of this grocery store, which are roughly equivalent to those of the staff at your average KFC, she's virtually a supermodel -- so I can totally see where the bagger was coming from. He just wasn't picking up on the fact that she wasn't interested.
