Toilet Paper and Salad Dressing: Lost at the Supermarket!

Seems like you have to almost be a Rocket Scientist to survive the supermarket, these days.

Yesterday, I was at Safeway... needing something pretty basic: a bottle of Ranch dressing.

You'd think pretty much any idiot could figure that out, but evidently I must be a very special kind of idiot.

California poppies near our house...

There's "Lite" Ranch, "Low Sodium" Ranch, "Fat Free" Ranch, "Bacon" Ranch, "Blue Cheese" Ranch, "Parmesan" Ranch, "Garlic" Ranch... the one thing that doesn't seem to be there is just a bottle of good old-fashioned Ranch dressing.

Not "New And Improved" and not an "Exciting New Flavor!"

As I said, I must be a special kind of idiot because even though I thought I had actually found "normal" Ranch... I actually had ended up buying a bottle of "Lite" Ranch... which looks precisely how I remember the Ranch dressing bottle... except for a small Lite printed on the bottleneck.

It will now either rot on our pantry shelf, or get consumed next time our daughter visits. Maybe...

Then There's Toilet Paper....

Since when did a roll of toilet paper stop being a roll of toilet paper?

Now there are "rolls" and "double rolls" and "mega rolls" (some of which are "giant") and the packages of the latter are emblazoned with the words "The same as 24 regular sized rolls!" on a package of six.

Seriously? It's a package with six rolls of toilet paper...

Evidently, someone thinks they are being clever, but they are not so clever as to have considered that if you live in a somewhat older house with a "built-in" toilet paper holder, those mega rolls don't actually fit.

My friend — who's more on top of current marketing trends than I — says that consumers get "bored" when products stay unchanged for too long.

It's f!cking toilet paper! It's one of the most UTILITARIAN products on the planet! I'm not buying it because I need ENTERTAINMENT for my boredom!

It just sort of goes to show that "New and Improved" often is anything but...

Boredom and Olive-Tuna-Nut-Cranberry Bread

As I am sitting here, in the middle of this mini-rant, I am reminded of a friend from many years ago, back when I lived in Texas,

She was a very keen — and typically "adventurous" — baker.

Which frequently meant that she would come up with concoctions that had no business seeing the light of day, let alone the inside of an oven.

Blooming grape mahonia

Don't get me wrong, I love freshly baked bread. Bread. I even like a nice cinnamon loaf, and I like garlic bread, and I like lemon pound cake.

I do NOT, however, like "lemon-garlic-cinnamon loaf," and I do NOT buy into the excuse that it's "exciting." It's not the kind of excitement my taste buds are looking for.

And yet? I see more and more "unlikely combinations" of foods being marketed as "exciting new flavors."

Maybe this is what "getting older" actually IS: as the old truism goes: "Aging is the process by which the expansiveness of your thinking and the narrowness of your waistline trade places."

Thanks for reading and have an awesome day!

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Created at 190603 16:56 PST
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