Sometimes a quest becomes damned depressing. This is the time of year when the lovely people at Ben and Jerry's come out with a pumpkinny ice cream---this time it's Pumpkin Cheesecake. Now I had spotted this at a local market but was not heading right home and didn't want either to slurp it all down, or to have it melt before I could even try it.
So later I stopped in at Smith's supermarket, having failed to find any at Trader Joe's, where the dim bulb manager seemed amazed that I even knew of this seasonal flavor, and wondered why the store didn't have it--the same store that was shoving Halloween down our throats in August, and pushing Thanksgiving and Christmas simultaneously as of November 1st.
Walgreen's was next--I knew they carried a few B&J items but no, said the manager, that's all decided at corporate and in truth all 7000 stores do not really have room to carry more than a few basic popular flavors. "You have a huge aisle always overflowing with seasonal, um, items," I said, but that does not extend to ice cream? "
"No--you see if they don't sell, then we have to pay for them and throw them out."
"What? What about donating them to the local food bank?" I asked.
"That's not possible. Management thinks the employees will steal the food, you see--or that they will deliberately damage things so as to make them unsaleable."
Temporarily silenced, I stood there while he pointed to a couple of security cameras. "See those?"
"70 percent of the cameras in the store are intended to watch the employees. And that's true in all the big supermarkets as well."
Lord. Makes you want to pour hot fudge over the pumpkin ice cream, if you ever find it, that is.
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