Category: Soapbox

I have been doing the majority of my grocery shopping at Market Basket for years now.  The grocery store closest to me, Johnnie’s Foodmaster, was never that great and it had been going downhill for years before it was sold to Whole Foods.  So I haven’t minded a few extra minutes and driving by 2 other grocery stores on my way to Market Basket.  But this summer, the Market Basket ersatz shutdown forced me to change my grocery shopping habits temporarily.  I’m now back to Market Basket full time but I used the Market Basket downtime to shop different grocery stores and do some comparisons.

I kept track of my purchases at the 3 major competitors and when Market Basket came back online (so to speak), I checked their prices on the same items.  I ended up with a pretty full spreadsheet but it still had a number of holes.  So this morning, I ran around to the 4 stores to plug as many of those holes as I could.  The following is a compilation of the comparative data I collected.  Yep, this is the kind of thing that only an engineer would apply to grocery shopping.

I’m going to jump to the price results because most people reading this would be interested in that first and foremost.  I have totaled a list of 34 grocery items of various types that were fairly easy to compare across the various stores.  Market Basket had all 34 items and I had prices for all of them.  Stop & Shop, Hannaford, and Shaw’s all were missing a few of the items or I goofed on getting prices for things so in those cases, I substituted an average price from the other 3 stores.  In the case of Stop & Shop, they still do a loyalty card for savings which effectively means 2 different result sets from one shopping trip so I treated those results as different (more on that below).  And for Shaw’s, there were a number of sale items that changed things considerably so I’ve treated those results as different too (again, more on that below.)  Here are the results:

Market Basket: $88.11

Hannaford: $96.16

Shaw’s normal prices: $108.91

Shaw’s with sale prices: $103.21

Stop & Shop without card: $114.75

Stop & Shop with card: $105.01

And here’s the full detail about how I got to those total prices:  grocery2014.numbers

Market Basket is the clear winner and Stop & Shop without a card is the easy loser coming in $26.64 higher.  That’s 30% higher than Market Basket!  And to put that in perspective, if you were to switch from Stop & Shop without a card to Market Basket and buy these same items for 52 weeks straight, you’d save $1385.28 in the course of a year.  Even Stop & Shop with a card is 19% higher than Market Basket with a 52 week difference of $878.80.  The prices tell a lot of the story, but there’s a lot more to consider when grocery shopping and those things may vary for different people.

 

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I got an e-mail from Delta with the text “In response to your feedback and as part of our ongoing efforts to improve your travel experience on Delta” … As I’m reading I’m thinking “that’s BS so whatever comes next is going to be bad”. And it was. Now instead of being rewarded for miles you travel, you earn “miles” by spending money. Obviously, that rewards those who travel on the full-fare, book last minute, and are reimbursed by well-monied companies. It does not reward the travelers who plan in advance, get non-refundable fares, and are the bulk of the passengers. In other words, Delta is no longer rewarding you for the discomfort endured by sitting in the too-small seat. Instead it will reward those who don’t actually need the free travel because they can clearly pay as much as they want already. At least Delta isn’t pretending that there will be any trickle-down benefits for the flying middle class.  If Delta really wanted to listen to the general public’s feedback, they’d remove a few rows of seats, increase the seat pitch, and include checked bags in the cost of the airfare.

To add insult to injury, when I was traveling a few weeks ago on Delta, the connection had me in Detroit for 3 hours.  Oh well, I figured, what are you going to do.  But when I landed, I found that there was an earlier flight that was going to leave in 40 minutes.  I hoofed it all the way across that huge yardstick of an airport and nicely asked the gate agent if there was room on the earlier flight.  There was.  But since I wasn’t a “medallion” member, it would mean a $50 change fee.  That’s just about exactly the amount that was too much for me.  (I could have saved 2 hours but I would have been in a middle seat on a nearly full plane and wouldn’t have the time to go get the food I was looking forward to.)  And all I could think was “no, I’m not a medallion member and unlikely I am going to be given the new program and Delta’s general dislike of *people*!”.

Another unwelcome change is Amazon increasing Prime from $79 to $99.  Do I want to pay $100 for free 2-day shipping?  I don’t know.  I feel pretty good that the $79 has been worth it.  Especially with the volume of stuff we’ve been getting for the house projects.  But I’m not sure that we’ll have the same volume of stuff as the house projects dwindle down and $20 more may be too much even if the volume was the same.  The only good thing for me here is that my Prime membership expires in January so I have 10 months for Amazon to change their mind.  (Though Amazon doesn’t seem like the kind of company that would pull a Netflix by announcing a change of plans and then change their mind.)

United Airlines sent an e-mail saying this:

“Friendly” now means more than it ever did. It means being user-friendly. In other words, flyer-friendly℠. We’re giving you an unmatched global network with more onboard product features, better technology and, of course, great customer service.

Also, this great quote:

From take off to landing, putting you first.

I know their marketing department didn’t mean it this way, but here’s how I translate their message:

Once you are in your seat, you’ll be able to pay to access more things than you could before.  And we’re going to send a memo out to all flight attendants reminding them to smile, regardless of whether United is treating them well or if they are people that belong in a service industry.

The seats themselves will only be friendly if you pay for them to be.  If you choose regular Economy (or your company chooses it for you), those seats will remain unfriendly to your knees, back, and derriere unless you are a child.

As for getting in your seat, that’s still going to be a full-on crap-fest.  We are going to charge you for anything that you might find to be helpful to your flight.  We are going to continue charging for checked bags so that we make you carry the maximum amount of luggage through the airport which also makes things slower at security.  And it also makes it worse for people who get on the plane last and discover that their bag still needs to be checked.  We will continue to board by groups of rows so that we can get all of the congestion into the same part of the plane as quickly as possible giving us the greatest opportunity to be late pushing back from the gate and wasting as much of your time as we can.

In other words, the same as most other airlines. The only thing to differentiate United from the others is their new look which is only superficial – perhaps therefore truly representative of the level of change they are enacting.

I was listening to the news yesterday. I haven’t done that much recently between work, house, and vacation, but I had a minute in the car. The news reports went something like the following: “People are still trying to figure out why somebody killed 6 people at a Mosque yesterday”… “the man who shot up a theater full of people in Aurora Colorado is being held”… “the man who shot congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and supporters is likely to plea guilty”… I knew about all of these events but to hear them one after the other as headline #1, #2, and #3 was truly sobering.  And frankly it’s getting to me – the sadness of the tragedies of the past and the wariness of protecting my family in public places.

Perhaps in a post 9/11 world, crazy people are more inclined to violence.  Maybe violence in movies and videogames has desensitized the nation somewhat and crazy people feel more emboldened.  Maybe crazy people want to act out more now because of the spectacle that they can create through today’s media.

But there’s no denying the fact that in all of these cases, crazy people had inappropriate access to firearms.  What the actual fuck is wrong with this country that we can’t prioritize the safety of the general population over the rights to bear arms?  If there were federal laws about gun ownership and registration that included psych evaluations, waiting periods, etc., the people who like guns could still own guns and most of the crazies would be prevented from having firearms.  Gun control needs to be managed at the federal level because if somebody can get a gun easily in one state by just driving around the country, then the whole country is as exposed as the state with the weakest laws.

Regardless the specifics about certain rights afforded by the Constitution and it’s Amendments, one thing is constant throughout: those rights are provided so long as they do not interfere with other people’s rights.  And I have to say that the right for me to draw breath definitely trumps anyone’s right to get a gun without first being checked to see if they are crazy.  If you disagree with this statement, then, well, you are crazy.

I understand that no check is going to be foolproof.  A check for crazy people isn’t going to catch 100% of crazy people.  I also understand that crazy people might shift to fertilizer bombs instead of firearms.  Increased gun control will not prevent public shootings from happening ever again.  But considering the three most recent cases and the three that topped the news yesterday morning, all 3 of those would have been prevented by keeping crazy people from having guns.

You could even roll the shooting of Florida teen Trayvon Martin in here too.  No question Zimmerman is not in a sound state of mind.  And a screening to check to see if he was all there before he could buy a gun would have been a good thing.

As for some more prominent opinions in the news, there was former Arizona state senator Russell Pearce who doubled down on gun ownership by saying the problem was not that the shooter had a gun but that the rest of the audience didn’t.  Well, it’s true that if everyone else was armed, the shooter probably would have gotten fewer shots off and the body count would have been lower.  But I’m solidly in the camp that dialing the violence down to zero is better than turning the theater into battlefield.  You can also look at the Martin/Zimmerman case and realize that if the theater was armed and if a kid stood up in the middle of a theater with a batman toy gun, he could be mistaken for a copycat and somebody who is armed could think that they are doing what former senator Pearce suggested and “defend” the rest of the theater by killing a kid who got overcome with his imagination.

I prefer the opinion of Scott Ian who wrote the following on Twitter:  “To those asking, I am a gun enthusiast that has a big problem with how easy it is for people that have no business owning a gun to get one. The old argument of ‘if guns are outlawed, then only outlaws will have guns’ means nothing. The ‘outlaws’ get their guns illegally and use them to perpetrate crimes that get them paid, they don’t go shooting innocent people in movie theaters.”  In other words, yes, people would still get their guns illegally but the people that are the most worrisome to the general population today?  They wouldn’t have the same access they do today.  And that’s gotta be a good thing.

Christmas has now passed and the “War on Christmas” will go into hibernation for the next 11 months. But we are in a cycle now where we annually need to choose between being overly politically correct or religiously insensitive. Does it have to be this way? Of course not. I say we should say “Merry Christmas”, but perhaps not for the reasons you might think. Like another political hot-button issue, it’s about terminology… but I’m getting ahead of myself.

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Speaking of Lady Gaga, there’s a track on her latest release named “Alejandro” which reminds me of Ace Of Base’s “The Sign”. It’s not that I hear the same exact notes or words but just the overall sound of the song seems very much like “The Sign”. Give them both listens and tell me what you think.

Not that I spend a lot of time watching music videos these days, but I have seen a few. The “Telephone” video with Lady Gaga gets points for reusing the, umm, vehicle from Kill Bill but other than that you’d need to be out of your mind for any of it to make sense. Even Gaga’s own Paparazzi video was much better and less wacked-out.

But the winner for over-the-top clearly goes to M.I.A.’s “Born Free”. Really more of a mood music piece than a pop song, you never see M.I.A. in the video. The nearly 9 minute “video” is actually a mini-film that shows redheads being brutally rounded up and then all mass-killed in varying graphic ways. Hard to believe YouTube isn’t censoring any of it. And no, I’m not going to link to it from here so I don’t encourage clicks and so I’m not blamed for putting images in your head which I’m wishing I could get out of mine.

I suppose the irony here is that music videos aren’t seen much at all these days and that the only way to have them seen is to turn them into spectacles that encourage discussion such as this blog post – sort of a “any publicity is good publicity” notion. But it won’t take many more gonzo videos before I stop clicking and searching for the next event music video since I’ve been let down by so many before.

Since it was requested by a regular blog reader, here’s my brief comment on this year’s Oscars broadcast. I remain dissatisfied with the content of the show: It’s a show about movies and people who watch the show like watching movies, so show clips of movies! How wrong is it to give somebody an award for best acting and not show any clips? Instead, they wasted time with obsequious drivel about each of the 5 actors and 5 actresses. The show ran long by over 30 minutes and they still needed to cut some speeches short while others were able to natter on and on. (I’m thinking of you, Jeff Bridges.) Also, forgetting to include Farrah Fawcett in the farewell montage was a big gaffe. The Oscars could learn a few things from the Grammys – keep things tight with minimal hosting (if Martin’s and Baldwin’s jokes were reduced by 50%, they would have been 50% funnier) and focus on the core content: movies.