Liver, don't fail me now!

Last night we went through, in a little over two hours, two six packs between two of us. That included one quarter of one movie, following me shutting her out in Trivial Pursuit, six to no. In her defense, the questions were slightly, vaguely, a tiny bit difficult.

Earlier in the evening, we had the fantastic IPA Junior at Red Rock, only to be shattered in our brilliant designs of a growler: it's on nitro, and they won't do it in a growler. Fuckers.

I spent much of the weekend looking at houses (the outsides) and today sent a list of seven to our realtor that I'd like to see the insides of. Mostly east side: the things on the west wide in our price range are either too damn far west or north, or varying degrees of yucky.

The babbling, prattling, and generally rude noise and cell phone usage in the SLC main public library continues to amaze me: people seem to think it's a fucking bar, except with no alcohol, and lots of books randomly strewn around.

Never too busy for consumer protection

The movers showed up today (with only two days advance request from me!) with all of our stuff, so our main front room currently looks like a storage unit. Thus, I don't have a heck of a lot of time to blog. BUT: I'm NEVER too busy to blog consumer protection. Here is the first non-response (excepting automated replies) from Albertson's:

Dear [dangr],

Thank you for contacting Albertsons Customer Care. We received your email regarding the produce at our 200 South store in Salt Lake City.

Please accept our apology. We want all of our customers to have a good experience when shopping with our company. We take our customers’ complaints seriously and have forwarded your complaint to the Store Director. For your records, your case number is 1*****.

Keeping you as a customer is important to us. You will be contacted with feedback regarding your case within 24 hours.

Again, thank you for contacting Albertsons Customer Care. If we can provide any information or be of service to you in the future, please do not hesitate to contact us by e-mail or by calling 1-877-***-****.

Sincerely,

Allison M.
Albertsons Customer Care Representative

What a thunderous silence this represents. Let's see what the next 24 hours yields.

Surprise, surprise: the shitty produce goes to the poorer neighborhoods

Here is the text of the message I just sent to Albertsons:

Frankly, I'm really pretty disgusted with Albertsons right now. On Saturday night, 9/3/05, around 7pm, I bought a lot of groceries from my local Albertsons, including a lot of produce.

This included two heads of fresh garlic, for a total of $1.00 + tax. The next night, 9/4/05, preparing dinner, I started peeling the garlic for a pasta sauce. When I came across one clove beginning to go bad, with extensive brown spots, I didn't think much of it, and threw it away. Then the next one also had lots of deep brown spots. Then the next one was actively rotting. Then another with brown spots. In the end, at least half of both heads were actively rotten, or getting very close to it. I stopped peeling, cooked the sauce without the garlic, and put it all in a ziploc bag.

When I took it in within an hour to Albertsons, I asked to speak with a manager. I didn't just want a $1.00 refund; I wanted to talk to someone who would actually look at this disgusting garlic. At 7:30pm, I was told no manager was in the store for the rest of the night. This for a store open until midnight? Operating for four and a half hours with no manager or managerial personnel?

I was instead approached by the produce clerk, a young man who was pleasant, and apologized, but seemed mystified that I wanted to talk to someone about it, and why a simple refund wasn't sufficient. He told me that "sometimes this just happens" and that while that garlic should have been thrown away when it was being stocked, it sometimes just gets through. In short, he basically dismissed my concerns, and blew me off.

My concerns, which I tried to explain to him (notably, in a calmer tone than this e-mail contains), were this: this produce wasn't just bad, it was TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE. It wasn't just a fluke: I've had bad produce on numerous other occasions from THIS Albertsons. In the past, I've just tossed it out, and written it off to "these things happen", as the young produce clerk blandly posited. I have now realized that it's a regular theme at this location:

And this is what is most irritating: the produce at this store is CONSISTENTLY worse than any other Albertsons in Salt Lake City that I have been to: older, less fresh, often bordering on rotten. It is also worse than Smith's supermarkets, the local competition. As I said to the cashier who gave me the refund, "Show me garlic like this in Sugarhouse". (Sugarhouse is a more affluent neighborhood, a few miles south from my downtown Salt Lake City neighborhood.) The cashier was very polite, and without obviously agreeing, silently ceded the point through body language.

So, I write to ask you several things:

1) Is there neighborhood profiling going on about where the old/nasty produce is sent, and/or how long it's kept on the shelf for sale? That is, do you send the bad stuff to the downtown store? Or the best stuff to the Sugarhouse (or other more affluent) stores?

2) Is it imaginable to you that no manager or managerial personnel would be present anywhere in the store from 7:30pm to closing (midnight)?

3) Do you find acceptable the explanation that "sometimes this just happens"?

I look forward to your response. E-mail is fine, as is paper mail.

Sincerely,
[signed, dangr]
Downtown Salt Lake City, Utah

Ding, dong:

... the fucker is dead, the fucker is dead, ding, dong, the rotten fucker is dead! The news, on one hand, is a cause for celebration: he was a really rotten son of a bitch, who probably did more to fuck up the federal judiciary than any other single person in history, though Shrubfucker is giving him a run for his money. From his being one of two dissenters in Roe v. Wade, right up to his engineering the annointing of King Shrubfucker, Rehnny has been fundamentally harmed our country, and the world, perhaps beyond all recovery. Oh course, the last several years of the intentionally styled Anti-Warren Court have been surprisingly unhorrifying, but only in comparison to the nonsense that issued from the high bench for decades under the asshole. I guess after Shrubfucker v. Gore, they had to scale back their long insincere "states rights" jurisprudence.

I can only hope that he died in pain, and that, since he ostensibly believes in hell, he is now there. With any luck, his appointed torturers in hell will be card-carrying ACLU members, black hooded anarchists from Eugene, women who actually want to retain some say over what happens to their bodies, and other people who love civil rights and individual liberties.

On the other hand, the result of this has been a rather frightening acceleration in Shrubfucker's continuing campaign to remake the third branch, long a stalwart of sanity in our government, in the image of a Rapture staging area. His nomination of Johnny Boy, a former Rehnny law clerk, to take up the big reins, was no surprise to me, but definitely ups the stakes. We'll have to see if the Demopublicans bend over and lick the boots of big money and power once again on the now even more problematic nomination of this lockstep partywhore demagogue.

And what will we get next? Will Shrubfucker engage in some insincere, manipulative, condescending racial pandering (ala "¡Viva Bush!", or the making of Condipo his Secretary of State) and nominate Alberto Gonzales or Emilio Garcia? Or maybe some equally disinginuous gender pandering (uhhh, Condipoo?), and nominate one of the Two Ediths: Edith Jones, or Edith Clement? Or will he murder two birds with one stone and go with Janice Brown? And on the topic, how many more stealth nominees does he have lurking beneath rocks? Stay tuned: this should get really, really ugly.

Katrina comes home

J was deployed yesterday to New Orleans to work on establishing a public health command center. Details are sketchy, but I talked to her this morning, and she was doing okay. They expected a long drive from Atlanta to New Orelans due to the need to avoid I-10. They expect to be camping at a naval air station, so they should be plenty safe.

I don't want to post many details here, since while I know very little, I don't now how much of it is public information.

Meanwhile, here in Utah, 600 (or more?) Internally Displaced Persons have been housed at Camp Williams, in Bluffdale, about 40 miles south of Salt Lake City. (see the definition for IDPs: they are probably not considered refugees, which requires that they have crossed an international border. Wikipedia goes on to clarify that "Environmental refugees (people displaced because of environmental problems such as drought) are not included in the definition of "refugee" under international law.") Finding clear information on volunteer opportunities is difficult; while I appreciate cash is more valuable than anything else right now, I, as usual, have more time than cash.