Parking lots are my nemesis, as far as attempting “live and let live”, so to speak. I get really cranked out by people leaving their shopping carts abandoned willy-nilly all over the place instead of putting them in the cart corrals or back in the store. It’s also irritating to go to pull into a parking spot only to find that some yahoo has left a cart in the front of the space where it can’t be seen until your bumper makes contact. Grrrr. And speaking of cart corrals, when the sign on the thing says, “Place carts in open side,” why do people attempt to jam five more carts into a space right next to that which could hold, oh maybe, two, on a good day? And why do they stuff the carts in every which way so that nobody can get any of them lined up and taking the least amount of space? Is this rocket science or what?
The justification for this kind of behavior is usually somewhere along the lines of, “They have people to come out and take care of that.” Sure “they” do, and those people have to be paid, adding to the operating costs, leading, eventually, to higher prices. Basic economics. Right? Not to mention the aggravation factor for all of the other persons using the parking lot and discovering ugly little surprises left for them by other drivers. Let’s not even open the can of worms left by people who can’t seem to manage using only ONE parking space (Am I still disgruntled about the yellow weasel who scratched my car? Take a guess.).
Also a no-no in my book is leaving carts cluttering up the marked areas for handicapped parking. This is NOTdesignated for cart return.
Inside the store, it’s not usually too bad, but there are some people who ought not to be allowed to have a shopping cart at all, or at least not without adult supervision. When the sign on the cart says, “No child in basket”, why do you suppose that some of these shoppers believe that it’s OK to plop a two-year-old in there among the boxes of mac-n-cheese, the open baskets of strawberries and a Boston cream pie from the bakery? And then to complain that all of the cart’s contents do not arrive at the check-out in perfect condition? Beats me.
And then there’s advertising lately.
Consumers Report ?has a feature on its back page pointing out discrepancies between statements on packages and the larger signs in the shopping aisle …or goof-ups in using homophones (words that sound the same but are spelled differently and have totally different meanings, e.g. pair, pear, pare), or just plain dumb mistakes somewhere in the marketing effort. If you spot one, you can document it and send it in to CR for publication. They often make some smart-aleck remark to go with the picture. I ran across one the other day in desserts (NOT deserts, as is occasionally noticed); it was a pudding of some sort, chocolate. On the front of the package was printed “Dark chocolate”, under that was “with Real Red Raspberries”. And under ?that?, in very small print, it said “artificially flavored.” Ummm. Seems to be some sort of disconnect here. Artificially-flavored real red raspberries are a new variety on me. Not something the Burpee people would have come up with , I’ll bet…nor the Stark Bro’s catalog. Don’t know about the chocolate.
Speaking of fruit…. Get ready to be shelling out more for your banana on the morning cereal or in a split with ice cream and toppings. There’s a disease ravaging banana plantations in much of the world, heading for Central America, whence cometh most of the fruit (the world’s most popular) which is sold in the U.S. That would be the Cavendish banana and it’s being attacked all over the world by a fungus known as Fusarium wilt or Panama Tropical Race 4 (TR4). The situation is being sometimes referred to as the ?Bananapocalypse,? because if somebody doesn’t figure out how to stop this stuff, it will be the end of bananas as we know them. There are other varieties but they don’t ship as well or they don’t taste the same or they look funny or there’s some other disqualifying aspect that takes them out of the running for “official fruit of the century” or whatever. There used to be other varieties of bananas that were available but they did not have all of the superior qualities of the Cavendish and they got hit by a? different? fungus. There’s feverish genetic research going on right now to avoid catastrophe; one such location is in Australia at a place called Humpty Doo. We should find out pretty soon how successful this research is; either the fruit changes radically, or it disappears, or there’s a new banana on the block that can fight off the fungus. Don’t toss out your recipes for banana bread just yet. You might want to start raising paw-paws to replace the disappearing fruit; I’ll let you know how that goes.
Cartoon explanation of my life : (Pearls Before Swine) Goat walks into room where Rat is watching TV, says, “I walked into this room for a reason and now I can’t remember why.” Rat says, “To find out you’re getting old and are now on the long slow road to the nursing home.” Goat says, “That wasn’t it.” Rat says, “How would you know?”
