Thought for Food

As a teenager, and again right after college, I worked in a grocery store. The two stints totaled about six years, and I did just about every job you could imagine, except meat cutter.

(Meat cutting is a skill that has to be developed. Keeping track of all of those different cuts and varieties of meat isn’t something learned quickly. Although I do think it stops well short of making a meat cutter capable of performing surgery on a human body, a claim made by a veteran meat cutter for one of the companies where I worked.)

Working in a grocery store imparts a certain amount of wisdom upon those who pay attention. Since everyone shops at a grocery store—rich, poor, young, old, black, white, brown, yellow, red—we get to know people from a wide swath of the community. And as any grocery worker will tell you, there’s no difference among people when they enter a grocery store. They’re all equal in their moronocity, which is a word I might have just invented. It describes the moronic level of a person.

People of great intellect outside of grocery stores are reduced to bumbling primates. Normally courteous people leave a trail of germs for other customers. Mathematicians forget how to count.

I’m not saying these things to be mean. I’m saying them so we can recognize there are problems. If you haven’t worked in a grocery store, you might not even know the problems exist. Perhaps you’re familiar with other manifestations of these problems if you work with the public in other fields, but some of them are distinctly grocery in nature.

So, as a public service to you, I have a few tips to keep in mind the next time you’re in a grocery store. The grocery employees will appreciate your new wisdom, as will your fellow shopper, although they might not even realize they’re benefitting from it.

Without further ado…

--Unless you have difficulty walking, you’re going to get into the store much quicker if you take that empty fifteenth space in the row than if you wait for the woman backing out of the second space in the row.

--The display of grapes in the produce department is not a free buffet. You know what grapes taste like. True, there is some variance in taste and firmness, so if you must try one grape, go ahead. Better still to squeeze a lone grape through the bag. Whatever you do, there’s no need to take an entire handful of grapes to chomp on as you walk through the store.

--There are other people in the store besides you, so try not to park your cart in the middle of the aisle.

--If something is empty on the shelf, then in all likelihood there is none “in the back.” And if you find someone to go check “in the back,” there’s a high likelihood that that person is going “in the back,” sitting on a stack of boxes for a minute, and then coming out and telling you there is no more.

--If you drop something and it breaks, please tell us so we can clean it up before every other customer drives their cart through it and drags it around the store. We won’t yell at you or even charge you for whatever your broke. Probably.

--If you can’t operate the self-check lanes, don’t use the self-check lanes.

--Express lanes. You see the sign. You know how to count. Don’t be a jerk.

--If an item doesn’t scan the first time, it’s not free. And believe it or not, you’re not the first person to come up with that idea.

--If an item doesn’t ring up with the right price, it’s more likely than not that you looked at the wrong tag.

--Most places will adjust the price of something that is “ringing up wrong.” They do this not because they know they made a mistake, but because it’s just easier than proving to you that the customer is not always right.

--At the end of your visit you’re going to have to pay for the things you buy. Best if you have your payment method ready. If you wait to dig into your wallet until the cashier tells you your total you’ve waited too long and you’re making things slower for everyone.

There you have it. My tips to you. There are plenty more where these came from. And if you think they don’t apply to you, please re-read them, because they do. The only way to make sure they never apply to you is to go work in a grocery store for a number of years.

I dare you.

Mad World

It’s NCAA tournament time. Or March Madness as it’s called. I think that name came from the seemingly unpredictable nature of men’s college basketball during the month. It might just as easily have come from the feeling we get when we discover that those tournament brackets that we filled out oh-so-carefully have become worthless.

I don’t follow college basketball as much as I used to. I can probably name more players in the Big Ten from the 1993-94 season than the 2013-14 season. I still pay attention every March though, and after Selection Sunday I still fill out a bracket, just like every other person with even a passing interest in sports.

And inevitably, usually by the following Friday, when the tournament is actually half over, my bracket is a mishmash of circles and lines—mostly lines—indicating which of my choices won and which lost. Then I beat myself up for not having foreseen that number thirteen seed upsetting the four seed. “It’s so obvious! How could I have missed it?” Psychological researchers have a term for this: Hindsight bias. We know all the answers after the fact!

That’s so annoying.

Maybe the only thing more annoying is seeing the brackets chosen by “experts” in college basketball. The “experts” inevitably choose mostly number one seeds to make it to the Final Four. Gee whiz, picking the best teams to win really takes a lot of expertise. Never mind that in the long history of the tournament all four number one seeds have made the Final Four only once. Experts continue to have foresight ignorance (I just coined that term) and pick the favorites to win. Is it bad that I gain a fairly large amount of joy from seeing experts look foolish?

The big story this year though is about the $1 billion challenge that some company is offering. If you correctly choose the winner of the 63 tournament games (after the play-in games) you’ll win $1 billion. Don’t go buying yourself a new house yet though. The chances of a choosing a perfect bracket are 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 to 1. That’s 9.2 quintillion. To one.

Let’s think of that another way. Every single person on the planet would have to complete 1.3 billion brackets each to ensure that someone would complete a perfect bracket. I’ve only done one bracket so far, so I guess it’s probably not going to happen.

I saw a story earlier today where some outplacement firm (what the heck is an outplacement firm?) estimated that March Madness costs the U.S. economy $1.2 billion in lost productivity. That sounds like one of the 64% of statistics that are made up on the spot! No doubt this is the work of some manager who can’t stand to see his employees having a little fun.

Maybe we’ll see those two stories come together. If someone chooses a perfect bracket maybe they can donate their $1 billion to the U.S. economy, so it only loses $200 million. Then, when you throw in the $1 bracket pools that take place in offices across the country, there’s probably no loss at all!

It’s no small coincidence that the NCAA Tournament championship game takes place in April. Most of the madness occurs in the early rounds in March. Unless there’s some underdog team playing, many people have lost interest by the time the championship game is on. All of our brackets are in the recycling bin by then, and when a team cuts down the nets we try to think back to three weeks earlier and figure out how we couldn’t have seen it coming.

Two weeks later no one even remembers who played in the championship game.

So I’ll monitor scores over the next few days and hope that my bracket doesn’t end up in the garbage before the work week is over. I know how it’ll turn out though. It’ll turn out the same way it always turns out: I’ll yell a few choice words about the bracket itself and become consumed with an irrational hatred for some small school that didn’t beat the powerhouse school like I predicted. Only this year I’ll have the added disappointment of not winning the billion dollars!

Madness indeed.

Schoolhouse Clock!

I read an article about a movement to push back the start time for high school students. Proponents of the movement claim that scientific research shows that the natural body clock of teenagers causes them to become tired later at night, which makes waking early for school difficult. They’re tired in class, and don’t learn as much as they would if they were well-rested. So the answer to this is to begin school later in the day to give the kids more time to sleep.

Are you kidding me?

Not to sound like an old fogey, but when I was in high school class started at 7:35 and the day ended at 2:35. We might have fantasized about the school district changing the start time to accommodate our lack of sleep, but I wouldn’t have expected them to actually do so.

Girl’97 is a junior in high school. Honestly, I don’t know what time she goes to bed, other than she’s asleep most nights by 10:30. Her school day begins at 7:45. This semester she’s taking a swimming class, which just happens to be first hour. So she’s in the pool and doing laps no later than 8:00. Yesterday she swam just under a mile in class, meaning she’d done more by 9:00 a.m. than most people did all day. Luckily, Girl’97 doesn’t seem to have much of a problem managing the 7:45 start time. Sure, sometimes she’s a bit surly in the morning, but mostly she’s just fine.

Similarly, I’m quite sure that many high school students have contended with early start times for the past century or so. You know, probably since labor laws were implemented and they began going to high school instead of waking at 5:30 to go work at a job.

I don’t mean to sound unsympathetic to the tired teenager’s plight, but I’m unsympathetic to the tired teenager’s plight. And if I were sympathetic, moving the beginning of the school day back doesn’t seem like the best solution.

Districts allow students to begin later because they know that students can’t get themselves to bed early enough to get eight hours of sleep. Yet they believe that these same students will have the self-discipline not to stay up an hour later since they know they don’t have to wake up as early?

The article mentions scientific studies that show that teenagers have a later release of the hormone melatonin, causing them to frequently not feel tired until 11:00 p.m. The glow of electronic devices can further delay the tired feeling, which is problematic since according to one study 88 percent of teenagers keep a cellphone in their room.

The implication that teenagers should begin school later because their biology tells them to stay up later ignores one simple fact: teenagers don’t go to sleep when they’re tired; they go to sleep when they want to!

There are two great points of irony in the article. In one instance a school district pushed back the start of their day from 7:55 to 8:55, which means the day ended at 4:05. Now student athletes frequently skip their last class so they can make away games on time. Sleeping through first hour: unacceptable. Skipping last hour for extracurricular activity: fine.

Right?

In that school district, one girl pushed for the later start time. She was frequently late for class when school started at 7:55. Now that the school district changed the start time and the day doesn’t begin until 8:55…she’s still late for class.

It’s safe to say that tired teenagers will be a problem for as long as society demands that teenagers do anything they don’t want to do. Is that a problem? Maybe. But it’s a problem that millions of teenagers have somehow overcome for decades. They might face a bigger problem when they leave high school and discover that the rest of the world isn’t going to change the hours of operation simply because they can’t get themselves to bed.  

Teenagers are unique. They’re not little children, they’re not mature adults. They’re learning how the world works, while already thinking they know how the world works. Instead of pushing back the beginning of the day, maybe we’d be better of with a simple three word set of instructions that apply to many different situations including when to go to bed and when to get to school: Be on time.

Damn you Winter!

Around five-thirty this morning, I looked out the window and saw white. Just as the trusty television weather folks had predicted, a winter storm rolled through overnight. It dropped some inches of snow, although about ten fewer inches than one sensationalist weatherman suggested might be possible a couple of nights ago.

It was a messy snow, the kind accompanied by fierce winds whose currents deposit drifts in a seemingly random pattern. Six inches here. Two feet there. Bare pavement over there. Some of that snow ends up stuck in the window screen and makes things look much worse than they actually are, but I could still tell it sucked.

But I did my duty and bundled up and went outside to shovel. (Yes, shovel. No snowblower here.) As soon as I started shoveling I realized that this was wet, heavy snow, unlike most of the powdery stuff we’ve had this winter. (Close to eighty inches of it, by the way!) And this wet, heavy snow, although nice for snowmen and snowballs, is a pain to shovel. Perhaps the only good thing about it is that it scrapes up from the sidewalk cleanly.

That’s what winter does to us. It forces us to look at the bright side of shoveling heavy, wet snow on a day that could have just as easily been seventy degrees and sunny.

The other thing that winter does is make us thankful.

There have been many cold days over the past few months when I’ve been outside with three layers of clothes, a frosty beard, and partially numb fingertips, trying to find a place to throw the latest inches of snow. The flakes came so fast and so often in weather so cold that I began to run out of room to put it. Piles at the end of my driveway grew taller than me, and a four-feet-high, twenty-feet-long snow wall separated my driveway from my neighbor’s. I watched the games in Sochi confident that if shoveling were an Olympic event I’d practiced enough to medal this year. 

Sometimes the only thing that kept me from becoming a less-crazy version of Jack Torrance (“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”) and stabbing at the mountainous piles of snow with my shovel while screaming obscenities was the thought that spring had to arrive sometime. And when it did, I’d enjoy it even more than in previous years thanks to the lousiness of this winter.

I think there’s something to that. Those of us who live in cold weather climates and have to suffer through months of weather forecasts that elicit such pitiful responses as “At least it’s only a few inches,” or “At least it’s above zero” enjoy the warmth much more than those who are in it year round.

Those jerks in warm weather locales don’t even appreciate what they have. “I’ve never seen snow,” they say, as though snow was a leprechaun and they had to see it to believe it. Well come on up, you warm weather wimps, and take a look at what we have here. Drive in it, shovel it, cancel plans because of it. Then maybe you’ll keep your mouth shut!

Winter is exercise. It’s what we have to do so we can enjoy summer, which is pizza and cheesecake. And we’re tougher because of it. We’re strong and lean and our pizza and cheesecake tastes better than theirs. They’re soft and lazy because they do nothing but eat pizza cheesecake. They do no exercise.

Figuratively speaking of course.   

It could be that I’m just jealous of warm weather places, but I don’t think so. I can complain about winter (hey, you do it to!), but even as I shiver in my car as I drive to get a gallon of milk at nine o’clock at night, I know that spring will be so much better because of it. Someday I’ll have the windows down and my arm hanging out as I drive to get that milk. The snow will be a distant memory. The reassuring scent of a distant skunk (an animal that has enough sense to spend the winter in a den and wait for spring) will permeate the air. The sound of cicadas and crickets will mesmerize me.

And maybe then I won’t be so angry at the warm weather people.

Until next winter.

Invented Problems for New Solutions

I read recently that Netflix agreed to a deal with Comcast to ensure faster access to their content. Details of the deal haven’t been announced, but it’s safe to say that Netflix will pay a large chunk of change to Comcast, and in return, Comcast will allow Netflix’s content to stream quickly over its lines. This will help alleviate some complaints that Netflix has received regarding loading and buffering delays of its content.

A couple of things about this really amaze me. One, it’s legal for a company providing internet access to accept money from a company providing content in exchange for faster access to that content. Good luck to anyone who wants to compete with Netflix. Two, we’ve reached the point where waiting for a movie to load or buffer is enough of an inconvenience that people will actually complain about it!

Thousands of films and television shows can be delivered directly to our living rooms. This is done instantly. Through wires we can’t even see. Or maybe not even through wires at all. And yet some of us still complain about a minutes-long delay in these programs loading. Imagine if we had to revert back to an earlier day in which the only opportunity to watch an old film or television show was to wait for it to appear on some local channel late at night.

Oh the humanity!

Technological developments of recent years are fascinating. But perhaps the most incredible invention of all is the invention of the continuous need for these things. Technology is cool, and it solves problems, but it also invents them. How else do we explain a company that’s willing to pay millions of dollars to eliminate a minutes or sometimes seconds-long delay in the operation of their product? A product, by the way, that only six years ago we were amazed even existed.

So instead of coming up with solutions for problems we didn’t even know we had, (“My, that picture on my television just looks incredibly fuzzy. If only I could purchase an expensive new television with a clearer picture,” said no one ever in the years immediately preceding the marketing of HDTVs), I propose a national effort to solve real problems. The sort of problems that drive us all crazy, but we probably rarely think about.

Now, you might think that some of these things aren’t really problems, or that they already have solutions. But if we accepted that answer, then most of the consumer electronics industry wouldn’t exist.

So my call to do better:

When the light turns green, why does it take half a minute before the fifteen cars ahead of me begin to accelerate? We all know it’s green. Why aren’t we all going at the same time, or at least a little sooner than we are now?

By now shouldn’t someone have invented a more effective way to remove snow from streets than a snowplow?

How about a door that prevents people wearing too much cologne or perfume from entering a building?

Why must pop (or soda or coke, depending on where you are) taste so much better from a fountain than a can? Let’s fix that.

Bar soap works great for ninety percent of its life. Then it gets down to a little nub and becomes practically worthless. It falls to the shower floor and slowly washes away. It’s like a soap tithe to the shower. How can we get around that?  

Pencils and crayons, too. Why do we just accept the waste that goes along with throwing away usable portions of these items?

Surely we can invent a better toothpaste tube, can’t we? At least it seems like people are trying to do something about this. The stand-up tubes with the pull-back dispenser at the top is marginally more effective, but also messier.

How about a razor that works, won’t end up in a landfill, doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, and isn’t something that I might accidentally kill myself with while using it?

Public restrooms. Enough said, isn’t it?

And for the love of God, would someone please figure out a way to take the calories out of cheesecake?

Is that too much to ask?