L.A. Boondoggle

Sorry about the delay in writing, it’s been a busy past month with school and everything else that I’m getting into.

I’m writing tonight to talk about grocery stores. A Fresh and Easy recently opened up a block away from me on Hollywood Blvd. I was impressed with the prices and the food and the absence of grocery store checkers. There were no lines and my shopping experience was as painless as possible. Tonight I shopped at Ralph’s, I’m not sure why but I did. The prices were unimpressive and the service was shit. I literally waited in line for an hour in the express lane and somehow summoned the strength to not bang my head against the fucking wall. When I take all the factors into account, I’d say that Fresh and Easy is a pretty obvious choice, or so I thought. Enter Fresh and Easy Facts.

If you live in the Los Angeles area, chances are you might have received one of their mailers in the past month or two. It’s a pamphlet that basically says that Fresh and Easy is bad because it doesn’t have grocery store checkers. Further research points you in the direction of their website located at http://freshandqueasy.com, how very mature. The site describes various environmental abuses made by Fresh and Easy’s parent company, Tesco, and even has a petition you can sign to refuse to shop their ever.  You’d think this would be enough to make me stop shopping there, unfortunately I’m a dick and I could give two shits about what the morons at Fresh and Easy Facts claim.

So lets break this down, shall we? The first issue that Fresh and Easy Facts wanted to inform me of was the fact that consumers want their grocery store checkers. I’ve never heard a bigger crock of shit in my life. Grocery store checkers would be alright if there were enough of them but there never are. Just tonight I saw huge lines of 20 or more people at each check stand, and get this, out of the 8 check stands available at the Ralph’s on Sunset, only 4 were open! This isn’t all too uncommon and I fail to find the logic in making so many check stand if only a few will be used at any one time. You could say that this isn’t the grocery checker’s fault but I don’t care because it’s not my fault either. Besides, their job isn’t that damn difficult, I can bag my groceries at a self check stand a lot quicker most of the time and I don’t have their professional experience.

As for the environmental aspect and the pesticides on organic foods bit, I don’t really care. Organic foods take 3 times the amount of arable farmland to produce, it’s basically the grocery shopping equivalent of driving a Hummer so I could really care less if pesticides go on the or not. If they taste good and they’re cheap, I’ll buy them, 9 times out of 10 the organics don’t taste all that good and they’re almost never cheaper. The organic propaganda machine is populated by idiots who know next to nothing about farming and agriculture and who apparently hate the environment as well.

Lastly, this petition to not shop at Fresh and Easy is ridiculous. I see Fresh and Easy as a pretty cool concept, cheaper prices, no bag checkers, no bullshit. I feel that the Fresh and Easy Facts site is a pathetic attempt by large grocery chains and grocery worker unions to defend an old, shitty model for grocery shopping by trying to squash the future of something that will ultimately benefit the consumer. Way to be anti free market and anti capitalist. This is hardly a grass roots campaign, it’s obvious that some major players are involved in this smear campaign since someone had to pay Blackrock Associates to run this little shit talking campaign.

In conclusion, I’d say shop wherever you want and don’t buy into corporate smear campaigns and maybe complain a little next time the lines at Ralph’s are long.