inauspicio.us

Norman, Will is not going to throw you off the pier!

I went back to the grocery store the other night, because that’s where they sell groceries. Steph was out of town (she’s back now!) and I was out of bread, yogurt, sugar, condensed soup, ice cream, and other necessities. Grocery shopping doesn’t really worry me any more; I’m practically a grown person, and generally I manage to get through the grocery store without major error. Since I am a child of the internet generation, I also know how to work the self checkouts. However, since I am a smug bastard about it, I always get stuck behind the one moron who just doesn’t understand the phrase “please place the item in the bag.” As an aside, whoever you are, in case you are reading: it means “PLEASE PLACE THE ITEM YOU JUST SCANNED IN THE BAG, YOU NITWIT.”

But the complexity of yogurt remains beyond me. Other grocery items require a solution in two dimensions, usually brand and flavor (ie. “Cheese: Tillamook, Pepper Jack” or “Energy Bars: Powerbar, vanilla”). But yogurt requires a solution in four dimensions:

• Brand: Store brand, because all the other yogurts are too damn small. If you’re not getting more calories out of your food than you expend opening it, you’re really wasting your time eating.
• Flavor: Peach. Yum.
• Stratification: None. Fruit on the bottom yogurt is more like two different kinds of food, yogurt and jam. Yogurt and jam are both great, but blended yogurt is more delicious.
• Aspartame content: None! What is the deal with sweetening yogurt? You can get unsweetened yogurt, which is not that delicious; sugar-free yogurt, which is like fruit flavored yogurt only disgusting; normal yogurt (which is always called “low fat” even though it’s more or less impossible to buy higher fat yogurt in any US grocery store); and “Fat Free” yogurt. It is this last one, “Fat Free”, that continues to cause me much anguish. “Fat Free” yogurt, I guess in a lame attempt to try to taste more like a “diet” product, is partially sweetened with aspartame! What the hell?

And the packaging for the different types of yogurt is exactly the damn same. Which is how I managed to come home with fifteen containers of aspar-freaking-tame-sweetened peach yogurt instead of fifteen containers of delicious, wholesome, healthy peach yogurt.

To illustrate my frustration, I visited their website to get a picture of the offending yogurt, to illustrate how poorly differentiated its features are. Shamefully, although the show photos of fifty-nine different varieties of yogurt, not one of them is of their house brand.

 

Damn.