Saturday, November 19, 2016

Meijer and the TMI scale

if you recall, I nearly Southern-Belle swooned upon seeing the new digital produce scales with accompanying sleek and silent label makers. #verklempt

being a Meijer customer since 1996 (yep, that's the year we moved to Michigan, 20 years! wait, where's my anniversary cake?!), I knew that "coming soon" in Meijer speak translated to, "eh, check back in about 3 weeks."

"coming soon" just couldn't come soon enough for me, and yet... it did!

5 weeks later...



isn't it beautiful? those are my apples, wrapped in noisy cellophane, sitting on a super high-tech stainless steel scale, with a legible label and upc code that the u-scan wouldn't dare reject and or give me computer-voice attitude.

I stood with hand over happy-thumping heart and reveled in the glory of the digital-scale. #herbivoreomnivorevictory 

go ahead, zoom in on the pic, look at that color screen giving the exact weight and subsequent price-- even the tares! no idea what a "tare" is or why I should care, but if someday I took the time to google it, I'm sure I would (maybe) learn to care. 

scan over to the right side of the screen, see the "Nutrition Facts" table? you thought that table was only for containers of yogurt, or jars of pickled beets, or bags of Doritos, but no(!) clearly, fruit and vegetables have nutritional information too! who knew? 

for instance, good news, a medium apple (1 serving) has no:
fat
cholesterol
sodium
or... protein 

hmm. hang on... 

but it does have: 
22 g of carbs 
16 g of sugar(?!) 

*Atkins gulp*

suddenly, I find myself questioning my abiding love for the Honeycrisp. my eyes leave the so-called "Nutrition Facts," hoping to unsee the troubling truth. 

my optic orbs search for refuge, or at least a distraction, at the "Description" title-- alas, more "information": 

apples are members of the rose family?! that's as earth shattering as the day I found out bananas went extinct in 1950 and now we eat cloned bananas! if that doesn't knock your yellow socks off, here's another fun banana fact--technically they're also herbs

there are 7000 apple varieties? I only can list off six, maybe seven varieties--has my life up to this point been an apple mockery? will I ever experience the other 6,993 apples?

apples float because 25% of their volume is air? math, and liquid displacement, isn't necessarily a pet interest of mine, so I let this one pass with a, "huh." #movingon

what really rocked my world was the bold "Storage" title. not ever have I refrigerated an apple. and that's the apple that broke my factoid back.

"TMI." I whisper.

I snatch my labeled bag of Honeycrisps (aka 66 g of carbs & 48 g of sugar roses) off the scale. a tinge of unease that the Scale of Too Much Information has tainted my go-to lunch bag fruit. 

and yet, even in that moment... I couldn't wait to see what the TMI scale had to say about brussels sprouts. #blechh

Thursday, November 03, 2016

Meijer and the favorite flaw

so, I've mentioned to you that I have many flaws. all 77 of The Meijer Chronicles pretty much support that I...

*am disrespectful to supposed authority
*am impatient with incompetence
*have overt eye roll tendencies
*refuse to suffer fools gladly
*often rely on thinly-veiled sarcasm

and my favorite flaw (I can have a favorite, right? or is that a flaw?)

*ignore the Meijer customer rulebook

over the years, I have religiously developed this flaw, or as I prefer to call it, axiom (first time to use that word!). a recent visit to Meijer reaffirmed my inability to shed my carefully crafted/tested axiom (just like saying it! ax-iom, axi-om, ax-i-om)...

before I said goodbye to the wacky world of fishing aisle, a nagging thought struck me, "what if barrel swivels are important?" having no idea what I was looking for (or why), I grabbed one of the smaller than the palm of my hand bag of barrel swivels. see pic below.

mid-way through my unlimited u-scan check-out experience, the computer screen yelled at me to, "please place item on belt."

the itemized on-screen list indicated that the last item I scanned and placed on the belt was the baggie of barrel swivels. my eyes darted to the belt, not there, and nowhere to be seen.

my heart sunk, my palms sweated, I desperately searched for the barely-a-gram-in-weight baggie before... 

too late. my heretofore happy-green lane light snuffed out, replaced with the dreaded red blinking light. 

I was now at the mercy of the Podium of Power. 

a nanosecond of hope dashed when I realized the current Steward of the Podium of Power was the third-string player in Meijer's world of cashiers. *gulp and overt eyeroll*

he glanced at his Podium's screen, looked my way...

in my desperateness (always playing beat the clock), I waved with a smile, even a little "oops" chuckle as I pointed to my glaring red blinker above my lane.

SotPoP tapped his screen acknowledging that he was on his way to help...
my smile widened, I even let my eyes sparkle. that's called: sin-cer-i-ty 

he walked from the PoP...
I whispered, "good, good. that's right, over here..."

then he ducked into a different blinking red light lane.

DOOMED! 

and no, I'm not being dramatic. that other Meijer customer's dilemma was that she wanted to void out an item and argue about whether it was or was not on sale! 

Meijer newspaper ads were searched, phone calls to the department were made, and subsequent 'can you hold?' minutes were burned-- do you have any idea how many years I was now sentenced to wait?! 

and that's the exact moment my Meijer axiom kicked in. 

ignore the Meijer customer rulebook

in the past, whenever there's been a problem that only a Meijer associate could solve (and there were, of course, no associates to be found), I went to the closest in-house phone and started dialing numbers; certain that someone would pick up, or the Watchers via security camera would alert an associate that a customer dared to pick up a phone. #alwaysworks

but my tried-and-true solution couldn't save me here. while Sid and Nancy argued, my desperateness level ratcheted up several notches. I turned to my Sherlock Holmes skills to analyze the Mystery of the Missing Bag of Barrel Swivels.

"the belt swallowed them." (7 seconds, a new PR for my brain)

I lifted the first section of conveyer belt. nothing. right about the moment I hefted the longer/heavier second conveyer belt section, Sid went silent and began the process of extricating himself from Nancy, suddenly interested in my red light. ;)

and there it was, the precious little bag of something that helped fishing somehow, and miraculously ended my suffering.

I am always loathe to promote bumper sticker triteness, but I do recall this one: 
"we all have flaws. the end."