Out of Stock
Have you ever noticed how CostCo carries everything you could want, until you want it? They get you hooked with a great deal on the 50 oz Breugers Soft Cream Cheese in a tub, only to pull a “bait and switch” in two months and carry only the Philadelphia brand in a box. It’s the same quantity and price, so what’s the big deal? Well, unless you own a restaurant, that box is a royal pain in the fanny for anyone who uses cream cheese at home. Enough so that I stopped buying my cream cheese at CostCo, even though the price difference was significant.
But this is just one example of a trend that has been plaguing me a lot lately. It’s the unavailability of basic products. Sometimes the products are so basic as to be shocking. Just this week I tried to buy a manual orange juicer. You know the ones I’m talking about, they look like a bowl with a ribbed cone in the middle. You plop half an orange over the cone and with a twist, whalla! Juice fills the bowl. I wanted a manual one because I just wanted something to allow me to squeeze the juice from one or two oranges at a pop, and rarely at that. Occasionally I need a bit of juice for cooking and such. Well, I figured that this would be the kind of thing you would find at the grocery store. My local Vons had egg slicers for cryin’ out loud. When was the last time you needed THAT? But no juicer.
Next I tried my favorite standby for household goods, Target. They have everything from wastebaskets to an entire asle of electric coffee makers… But no juicers, or at least no manual ones. They have several electric ones… for about $30.
Okay, now I’m getting worried, but there’s still the kitchen section of Linens and Things. They have “everything”. They have nearly half a store dedicated to cullinary supply… But no juicer.
Say what?! How can this be? Sure, I can go on the internet and hunt one of these puppies down, but that’s not the point. This was a standard item in every kitchen I ever grew up around. Am I THAT old, that this handy tool has been completely replaced with electric versions that cost ten times as much and take three times as long to clean? Are they difficult to make or something? Did the one plant left that makes juicers suddenly burn to the ground in a freak fire?
It seems to me that our society as a whole wouldn’t last two days if we had to go without power. We have so many “time and effort-saving” electrical appliances that we have completely lost whole technologies that were a given even two decades ago. When was the last time you ground your own hamburger? I bet your mother remembers. How about popcorn. Ever pop popcorn in a pan on the stove? Have you ever even done it without a microwave? I bet your kids haven’t. We send e-mail instead of “real” letters, zap heat-packs in the microwave for our bruises, and wash our clothes in machines. Sure, those things save us massive amounts of time (until they break down, and they WILL break down), but how many of us have worn something dirty off the floor because we couldn’t get to the laundry mat? Never mind that we have everything we need to do the job sitting right there in front of us… If we were willing to do it “by hand.”
Our society today is obsessed with “saving time.” Our fast-paced lifestyles don’t allow us the luxury of “waiting” for things. Our computers are multi-threaded so that we can click over and read our email while the spread sheet loads and the Photoshop action script dutifully processes two thousand images in the background. We used to take this time to go get a cup of coffee, but we don’t really even have time for that now. Everyone runs at “110%”. What the hell does that mean anyway? It’s not enough that we have to give nine hours of our lives away per day to earn a living, but we have to burn ourselves out in the process because, “it’s a standard in the industry.” Sure, so is death.
I heard on the radio that 1 in 10 teens attempts suicide. 1 in 10! And these are teenagers. What really does a teen have to worry about beyond school? Yeah, yeah. I know, they’re going through massive internal changes, blah, blah, blah… But come on. Did your stresses as a teen even come close to your adult problems? What are these people going to do when instead of dealing with getting dumped by X boy or girlfriend, they have a mortgage, two car payments, a shaky job and three kids of their own? And that’s a “normal” life in SoCal. Add to that, any number of disasters, natural or otherwise, a car accident, or even something as ordinary as getting screwed by a business partner, and you have an entire generation of people who simply can’t cope with the “industry standard” of living.
Now take away the electricity and expect those same people to survive… I don’t think so.