Have you ever really thought about all the people you’ve made out with in your life and analyzed what each met to you at that moment in time in your life?
Me neither. Moving on to more pertinent topics, like containers. Containers are insert superlative here. They really are. How Fleetwood Mac never wrote a song about them is inexplicable. They hold solids and liquids, and possibly both at the same time. And the beauty of recreational container use is the fact that you can put as little or as much (as you can fit) into them.
But I’m not here to talk about recreational container use. I’m here to talk about commercial container use. I define a commercial container as anything that has been packaged by the producer before being given to the consumer. So this would include the Lincoln Log bucket, the Manolo Blahnik shoe box (I like to relate to sassy SATC aficionados in my posts), or a jar of pickles.
Specifically, food containers are what I want to grumble about. A shoe box can be as small or large as it wants as long as two shoes are inside. But with food containers, the number one principal of consumerism is that we want the best bang for our buck. I don’t want to order a medium iced tea and then have you fill it up 3 ounces short of the top. Mason don’t play that. But Mason also doesn’t want to look like the penny pincher who complains and then gets the iced tea topped of with teenage saliva.
What’s really at the heart of this complaint is the very berry oatmeal I’ve been getting from Caribou Coffee. I pretty much eat oatmeal everyday for breakfast, with the exception of my Saturday egg & cheese sandwich and the occasional bagel and lox. I make a pretty decent oatmeal with cinnamon, blueberries, raisins, dates (sometimes), and a little skim milk. But my oatmeal doesn’t hold a candle (or iPhone with candle app) to the very berry oatmeal. It’s the slivered almonds and especially the strawberry compote that puts it way over the top. How over the top? Think Lady Gaga playing a burning piano with tigers eating sushi off her naked body. Now use your VCR’s tracking feature to adjust it back to a really good oatmeal. There. That over the top.
The Caribou oatmeal is so good I’ve been eschewing making oatmeal and just getting it on the way to work for the last week or so. And for $2.29, plus tax, it’s really not that economically malfeasant. The problem lies in the human element involved in the oatmeal preparation. Some of the baristas know what Mason likes and fill the container up to the top with copious amounts of compote. Then there’s the ones who are consistently an inch below the top of the container with the oatmeal and don’t understand the concept of the compote to oatmeal ratio.
One day I’m going to snap and complain about it in person, with some snarky comment like, “Guess that’s why you guys get owned by Starbucks and Dunkin’”, followed by me snapping several wooden coffee stirrers over my knee, a la Bo Jackson, and then storming off. Until then I will continue my Venti venting here (someone really needs to admit me to Alliterations Anonymous).
See the oatmeal fill level is the same problem you get with any prepared to order single serving item that involves any sort of mixing / blending. The same thing happens at Smoothie King or when I get a protein shake at the gym. The guy eyeballs the ingredients and then, once it is all mixed together and poured, hopes the end result approaches optimal fill zone. But if it doesn’t we, the consumer, are SOL because they’re not going to take the time to whip up a 2oz. portion of smoothie with tiny 20z. portion strawberries and tiny 20z. portion ice cubes.
So why don’t we stand up for the rightful portions we paid for? We wouldn’t pay $4 for a gallon of gas and be okay with getting 9/10 gallon. We wouldn’t buy a 10 pair pack of socks and smile politely when we pull out only 19 socks. Food is the only consumer product we continually allow ourselves to be sold short on. It’s been happening for at least as long as they’ve made potato chips. They are the godfather of all food container criminals, with their duffle sized bags filled with more air than my grandma’s oxygen tank. But no one ever laid it to Lays and now the lawlessness seems to have gotten too out of hand to wrangle back. For all of you looking for a solution in this post, I’m sorry to tell you I don’t have one. It’s a grim reality we face. The only thing I can say about this pickle is man do they pack pickles properly and I’ll probably be putting a pickle in my piehole promptly to praise pickle producers.
I’m with you on the smoothies, but not on the chips. They pay for ‘shelf space’, so it’s not in their best interest to fool customers unless they’re overcharging enough to compensate for the extra space they’ve purchased but don’t need. A grocery store is a real estate market, and every product and brand is trying to get the optimal size and location.
I hate the whole “the product has settled” as a reason for the difference. F that.
But they do! There’s no way to justify the amount of open space they have inside. It’s like a Frank Lloyd Wright house.