Adventures in food

I've now been back working at Food Basics for a week, and I have a few thoughts on the matter.

For one, I mentioned a few days ago that the music had improved in my absence. I'm no longer so sure that this is the case. When I first started at Basics, there were three music stations (all somehow set up by Food Basics corporate head office in Toronto) which the store could bounce between. This number must have expanded before last summer - either that, or somebody believed that "70s funk" was one of the three most important musical choices for grocery shoppers. The music I listened to on Monday was what I mentioned here before - by Wednesday, it had changed to smooth jazz instrumentals (which was actually a nice surprise, especially when I realized I knew a few of the songs), and now it's back to the usual 60s and 70s music. Variety is the spice of life, right?

Much as I'd like to use that last sentence to segue into something about spices, I just can't do it. However, I have finally solved one of the few aspects of the store which has puzzled me since I started working there - newspapers in the break room. On a semi-regular basis, I'll get up to the break room and find a copy, usually a day or two old, of the Toronto Sun. The Sun is chosen because the tabloid-style paper is the easiest to set on a table and read while eating one's lunch, not because anybody particularly enjoys its style of journalism. I've never known where these papers came from - I assumed somebody bought it and put it up there.

Now I know the truth. If a paper is a day old, nobody is going to buy it. And since the distributor only needs the front page (or wherever the bar code is) to credit us with an unsold paper, there is apparently no problem with someone grabbing a day-old paper and taking it up to the lunchroom. The point of this story: I'm going to be reading a lot of the Toronto Sun this summer.

Speaking of lunch, this is another dilemma for me. I'm going to be missing five meals (mostly lunches) per week due to work. By 'missing', I mean 'not eating at home'. So what am I to do? High school and university living have kinda put me off the "make a sandwich and take it along" route for a while, but at the same time, I'd sooner do that than buy microwavable stuff at the store. There's plenty of take-out options available to me...but I can't eat McDonald's or KFC very often at all, and I'd imagine I'd get sick of Subway and pizza before long. There's also a Chinese place with a great selection of lunch specials, but I don't want to be eating there weekly either. So I guess I'll be bringing my lunch from home a lot, unless any of you have some better ideas.

On another note, I think our customers have gotten four inches shorter, on average, since last summer. I don't know how else to explain the number of times I was asked "can you reach this for me?" yesterday.

Finally, if you pay attention to the news, expect to hear stuff about a potential Food Basics strike within the next few weeks. And that is all I have to say about that.

--Ryan

P.S. Today's Pearls Before Swine once again made me laugh. I think it's the pig's expression in the third panel.