Sorry for the unexpected hiatus: busy week here in the Breadbin. We've had a couple of wicked ads back-to-back at work, with a grocery inventory in the middle of them. The sheer volume of customers is nice to see from a business perspective, I suppose....except most of them are cherry-pickers, in to buy the Guelph tap water (last week) or the I Can't Believe It's Not Butter (this week).
I've bitched about bottled water before and probably will again...it's the one product I'd like to see made illegal. Turn on your fucking taps, already. If your tap water is as undrinkable as ours--I doubt it, ours is God-awful--buy a filter. I've been tempted to write our city council demanding reimbursement for our water costs, but that'd get nowhere fast.
This week--I Can't Believe It's Not Butter. I used to think that was a President's Choice product...it's got that kind of a name, (PC brand condoms: Memories of Whatshername.)
Anyway, it's on for a buck a pound right now. We've run it at that retail probably fifteen times since I started at Price Chopper, and it's never gone so fast before. I brought in a skid--40 cases of 24--which historically has lasted until sometime Sunday. It was gone well before close of business Friday. I had to call our warehouse at noon on Friday and tack on 100 cases to Saturday's order.
WTF?
In hindsight, I should have considered (a) the fact it now regularly retails for a ridiculous $2.79/lb and (b) although the recession hasn't hit here in earnest just yet, people are very skittish. You put something on sale at a good price, people are going to buy six months' supply. I've noticed, too, that people are no longer quite as brand-loyal as they were even six months ago. It's all about the price. I'll have to bear that in mind from now on.
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I'm currently reading the publishing phenomenon that is The Shack. This was a Christmas gift from my father and stepmother, both of whom recommended it highly. While my dad's a fairly constant reader, I don't recall him praising a book as much. As soon as I finished the monster novel I've been lugging around for the past month, I resolved to read this.
The Shack is a difficult book for me. It's not that I haven't read books like it before (in fact, Neale Donald Walsch's Conversations with God is a touchstone in my life, the closest thing I have to a bible).
I've read quite a few "spiritual" tomes since. They all tend to say pretty much the same things (using different language), yet each one adds a tile to the mosiac of my own spirituality. My difficulty with this one rests in its overtly Christian tone.
This is a failing of mine I've recently recognized with some surprise. I've striven for most of the past decade to keep my mind open in as many spheres as possible; my wife has been, you'll pardon the expression, a godsend to me in that respect. Yet in some ways I've found I've only managed to replace one set of prejudices with another. In terms of my reading, that means I've been seeking not so much to expand my worldview as to reinforce it. There's an illusion of growth in that, but an illusion is all it is.
So this book comes to me at a good time. But it's a bit of a tough read. Give Young his due, though, he's managed to make me, a comfortably gnostic, childless man with an anything-but-tragic life story, relate shockingly well to a Christian (if somewhat faith-challenged) protagonist that is grief-stricken, suffering from a justified depression. The emotions in this novel ring very true...it makes you wonder what hells the author himself has lived through.
More to come when I'm finished...which, if this gets any more interesting, just might be tomorrow.
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