Rage From the Edge

A Brief Note On Writer's Block

I am one of those characters who think that writer’s block is a myth. There is no reason for a writer not to write. They can sit down with a pen or a word possessor and type out the word “blah” for fifty-nine pages, I don’t care. What they really mean when they say “writer’s block” is that they don’t have any fresh ideas. Well, guess what? This little article is when I run out of fresh ideas. See? I don’t have writer’s block…after all, I am writing here aren’t I?

I once took a creative writing class at a local university. The old lady who taught the class told us that we should have warm-up exercises for when the mood to write struck us. Nobody expects to be André Aggasi the first time they step on a tennis court do they? Of course they don’t! She said. It took old André years and years of practice to get where he is today.

This was years ago of course, and she had no idea of what might become of André, but the gist of her comments are true. I run into people all the time who say they want to write, they just don’t know how or don’t know what to do when they get in front of a computer screen. They all expect to be experts at writing without even thinking about what a writer does. Here is what I tell them: type whatever comes into your head. Do that for a while and see what you come up with. No, it doesn’t need to be the great American novel; I doesn’t have to be good at all. It just has to be.

Keep at it. Don’t just quit because the first time you tried to write something it didn’t meet your standards. Remember, you are in training here, you aren’t playing in the Super Bowl. That might come later, if you have worked hard enough. But don’t you bet the farm on that. Just be happy that you are writing something and you are exercising your “writing muscles.”

Here is where the hard part comes in. Those writing muscles need to be exercised every day. That means you have to sit down and write in an out of the way place. No kids howling in your ear, no television on…that stuff can come later (if it comes at all) when you have the writer’s equivalent of six-pack abs. Every day means every day. I don’t care if you feel like shit because you got drunk the night before and you threw up in the wastebasket by the side of the bed…you have to write. After you have figured out a place and time to set aside for writing, you have to decide on an amount of time. Before, I said “little while” when describing how long you should write for. I don’t think that what I said is good advice. Here is some better time advice for writers:

Write for twenty minutes the first time you sit down to do it. That means you don’t stop for anything and you don’t sit there and stare at the lines on the paper or the cursor on your screen. What that means is that you have to keep your fingers moving the entire time you are there. It sounds hard, and it will be hard first…but trust me, you will get the hang of it in almost no time. If a boob like me can force himself to write like I do, you shouldn’t have any problems.

Work at the twenty-minute level for a week or two. After that, you are going to want to increase the amount of time you use for your training. I suggest making it thirty minutes and then increase you time every few weeks after that. Remember, this isn’t about quality, it is about quantity. Once you have thrown off the shackles of “writer’s block” and get your game face on, you should be able to tackle harder things like making sense and making stories.

The Worst Breakup In History

I am in New Mexico or Arizona I cannot remember which. The year is 1991 and I am a twenty-one year old young man. My car has broken down in a terrible little town and I am stuck there until the repairs can be completed. I have been waiting in this town for about a week…they are sending a part from Alamogordo and it has yet to arrive.

I get a hotel room and wait the week. While I am waiting, I can explain to you how I came to be here and a little bit about the whole scenario. When I turned twenty-one, I decided that I wanted to see the United States. The girl I was dating at the time was keen on the idea too, so we got into a car and just drove. We saw states in the east, west, north, and south. We didn’t stay anywhere long, we were trying to fit in as much as we could until the money ran out and we were forced to stop and work. Her name was Cynthia.

After we left Texas, we tried to drive across the southwestern states and someplace in that mess, before we hit the Grand Canyon, the alternator and the power steering unit on the car went out. The car wasn’t convenient and didn’t break down in the middle of a populated area…no, it broke down in the desert. We were forced to walk to a small down about eight miles down the road. There, we discovered what it is like to live in a “company town.”

This place had one hotel, one restaurant, one grocery store, one bar, one auto-wrecker service, and one car repair shop. And they were all owned by the same man. After we paid three hundred bucks to get the car towed into town, we had to rent a dingy hotel room for the night. We got lucky; our AAA card got us out of having to spend and arm and a leg to pay for the room. Our luck, as it was, was about to run out.

Once the mechanic and the repair shop manager got a look at the repairs needed, they got on the phone and our story was out…everybody knew that we were stranded and that we were going to be paying through the nose for everything. If we entered a store, the prices went up. If we went to the restaurant, the prices went up. If we went to the bar, the drinks were twice as expensive. And finally, if we needed our car to be repaired, it was going to be a while. The whole town worked in concert in an effort to drain what cash we had on hand.

So now that you know what kind of situation I was in, let me tell you about the girl who was traveling with me. Cynthia was much older than I was. She was pretty and she liked to drink. To be perfectly honest with you, I don’t remember much more about her and I cannot recall why I decided to have her on the trip with me. It just seemed to fall into place and stay that way. Cynthia also had a huge temper. Her glacier blue eyes would flash at you when she got mad and her mouth could twist into a…rictus.

Ha ha, rictus…where the hell did I come up with that word? Nevertheless, it fits…she could get so mad; a person would have to make up words to describe her state. This was not a bad thing because she wouldn’t often get angry unless she was drinking alcohol…oh wait, I also said she liked to drink, and by that I mean she liked to drink all the time.

So there we were in a hot hotel room in Arizona or New Mexico, I can’t remember which…and I am tired. The whole experience has worn me out to the point where I want to take a hot bath and then take a long nap with the cold fan blowing on me. I prepare myself to do just that.

Cynthia had other ideas. She wanted to go out and perhaps get drunk in the bar. I didn’t, but when she asked her if it was okay that she go out alone, I didn’t stop her. This was at about 8:00 p.m. So she made herself pretty and called a cab. The cab got there around fifteen minutes later and she left, telling me goodbye on the way out the door. I fell asleep.

Loud yells in the parking lot woke me up. I checked my watch on the nightstand and it was 4:45 a.m. People were out in the parking lot yelling at each other and some Mexican styled music was blaring from a car stereo. I got up and noticed that Cynthia was not in the room…oh crap.

I moved the dusty old shades aside and looked out the window. There, in the parking lot was a cherry 1967 Camaro SS parked diagonally in three parking spaces, the driver and passenger doors open. Nobody was around the car and its stereo was pouring music loudly into the dry night air. I put my clothes on and went to investigate.

The parking lot was empty of people, but I heard sounds coming from around the corner of my hotel building. I quietly walked over to the corner and gave a quick glance around it. There, on the ground was Cynthia, her dress up above her waist and her legs covered in bloody scratches. Standing over her was a young guy in a white tank top and some ripped up old jeans, he was attempting to get Cynthia on her feet. I approached slowly, not really knowing what to expect from this situation. As I came closer, the guy heard me and gave me a funny look. He muttered a few words under his breath and then drunkenly weaved his way back to his car. From what I gathered at this point, he had been elected to drive Cynthia home and was still not happy about it.

He sped off out of the parking lot with a roar of his nice engine and a squeal of his expensive tires. I was stuck with a very drunk Cynthia. I tried to get her up but she didn’t want my help. She was mad and for some reason her mind decided that she was mad at me.

“Fuggin gettin me drunk…fuggin” was what she said.

I managed to coax her back into the hotel room and got her into bed. She wasn’t done though. After I had put her in the bed, I had gone to the bathroom. After I was done in there, I opened the door and she was standing just outside the bathroom doorway…that rictus was plastered on her face.

She gave a short yell and tried to hit me with her right hand. I staggered backwards and caught her fist right before it slammed into my face. She gave another quick yell and swung at me with her left fist. I caught that one too, but now I was fully in the bathroom. We both stood that way for a moment, looking at each other like idiots. She was on one side of the doorway and I was on the other. I can still remember exactly the way she looked right at that moment. I can remember it so well because it was about to become an incredibly painful moment for me that I shall remember for the rest of my days. She gave me a queer look and then brought her face forward as if to head butt my chest…but she didn’t do that, she bit me.

Oh how I howled. She brought her head back in a quick jerk and there were pieces of my shirt in her mouth. Blood was just beginning to shower down my front as I let go of her hands and gave her a mighty push backwards. She righted herself and made ready to attack again, but it was out of her hands, I shut and locked the bathroom door on her wild and raging face.

She beat on the door for another fifteen minutes before she stumbled over to the bed and passed out. I got called quite a few choice names during that fifteen minutes, but I didn’t reply. I was trying to keep quiet because I was sure somebody had called the police.

Sure enough, a few minutes after she passed out, the door began to boom. The police were out there and they were asking us to open the door with thick accents. I decided I wanted no part of the fun that was about to begin, so I stayed in the bathroom. Also, I didn’t want her to go to jail for trying to kill me, so I figured I better not present any evidence that the police might find and use against her.

Cynthia groggily got up and opened the door. For the life of me I do not know what she said to the police, but whatever it was, it must have worked. Despite being covered in my blood and being as drunk as humanly possible without dying, she didn’t go to jail that night. I still am amazed at this fact. After a few more bits of conversation, I heard her apologize rather loudly, shut the door and then crash on the bed once again.

After the excitement was over, I turned to my wound to assess the damages a bite could do to a human chest. I took my shirt off and was presented with a large wound. She had taken a nice chunk of flesh out of me right next to my right nipple. God did it hurt! I wadded up some toilet paper and stuck it to my chest. The bleeding stopped after a while and so I sat down on the edge of the tub. I was not going to go back out there and further risk damages to myself or another visit by the local police. Better to just wait it out in here. Sometime while I was waiting, I fell asleep in the tub. I didn’t wake up until somebody began beating on the door.

I unlocked the lock and entered the room. There Cynthia was, eating a donut and drinking some coffee from the “continental breakfast” table that was set up in the hotel check-in office. She had some for me.

“Good morning,” she said with a smile. She had forgotten the previous night entirely.

I glanced at my watch, still there on the nightstand. It was just after noon. I gave her a dirty look and got a fresh shirt. It was then she noticed the damage that had been done to my chest and she asked me how it happened. I gave her an incredulous look and then launched into a tirade where I criticized her, her parents, her friends, and I think I even threw a few pokes at God during the speech. She still had absolutely no idea of what had happened and it only made me more mad when I had to keep telling her that yes, this really did occur.

We got the car back a few days later and decided that it was now time for the “talk” we had been putting off since the incident. We drove out of that little terrible town and found a tourist trap about sixty miles away. The place was a historical outcropping of rocks where some battle had been fought. We spent a few minutes climbing up the rocks and finally sat down on the flat surface of the mesa. I took a deep breath and looked at her, willing her to say something. She took her cue, and I swear, God as my witness, she said this:

“I guess this means we aren’t dating anymore?”

Roommates


That last article about Jeremy reminded me that I have had some champion roommates. I may be the world’s worst person to live with, but I can say with a hint of pride that some of the people I have lived with are giving me a run for my money.

Being a bum, drunk, college kid, live-in boyfriend, and a general waste of life allows you to see and experience things that a normal person who follows the “family plan” just don’t get to see. I am not saying that a lot of people don’t get to share in some of the experiences I have had, but I am saying that maybe they didn’t enjoy them (for some reason) with such relish as I did. I don’t want to sound like I am looking down on people who (seem) to have a normal life (house, garage, two kids) . In fact, I am envious of them at times. They don’t have to put up with the crap I have had to put up with. Then again, I wouldn’t trade the past in for anything…unless it was a large sum of money or a book contract or both; even though that doesn’t really happen.

Anyways, here is a list of some of my all time favorite roommates:

·Alexandra - a girl I live with when I first moved out on my own. She was a hippy and she wore patchouli oil all the time. When I came to my senses, I moved out. Later, after she discovered that I had moved out, she filed charges on me stating that I had stolen my own things from the apartment. She never even showed up to court. Charges dropped, I never saw her again.

·Christine – I lived with this girl while I lived with Alex (above). I think I saw her a total of five times in the entire year I lived in that apartment. She worked a lot.

·Lance – The psycho OCD pharmacy student. Actually, he was trying to get into medical school but failed miserably, so he went to pharmacy college. He couldn’t stand himself or anybody around him. Nonetheless, he was very funny and was good to have around in a fight. He killed himself a few years ago.

·Andy – This guy was a winner. He lived with Lance and I for a while until we got sick of his bullshit and kicked him out. He never paid any bills and he never paid for any of the household items. Lance and I got it into our heads that we were going to lock up the toiletries so that he would have go and buy his own. He then used coffee filters to wipe his ass after taking a dump. He is a cop now.

·Liam – When Liam moved in, so did his girlfriend unofficially. They were never apart and I think they are still married now. Liam was a drummer. He had all the prerequisite percussion accoutrements all over the house. This didn’t bother me very much because he was a great roommate. His girlfriend, on the other hand, was a total pain in the ass. She once destroyed our bathroom in a drunken fit of rage that involved vomit and a very large purse.

·Chris – This guy was a recovering heroin user. Recovering my ass.

·Derek – See Chris above. Also, Derek was a dealer…but I didn’t know that until our house was broken into and a safe that was hidden in Derek’s closet was thrown down the steps by the burglars. Total cost of damages to the house while Derek lived there: $2300.00. The last time I saw this guy, he was working for a compressed gas company; loading trucks.

·Brandon – Brandon was a pretty good roommate. He was never around and when he did show up, he was always cleaning. He was kind of creepy though because he insisted on having a padlock on his room’s door. Brandon lives in California now and helps run his father’s dry cleaning business.

·Tricia – Tricia was the daughter of a very rich man and also a girlfriend for a while. She was rather odd, but it never got in the way of being a good roommate. The problem here was that she never paid her bills and her rent would back up for six months. Because I was sleeping with her, she felt that I should pay…and I did. After a year of this going on, she moved out and her dad shows up a few weeks later with a check for all the money she owed me. The check bounced and she now lives on the other side of town in a house her father purchased for her.

·Debbie – Debbie was Tricia’s best friend who needed a place to stay. She moved in a few weeks after Tricia moved out, effectively killing their friendship and effectively killing the check that Tricia’s father wrote for me.

This list is by no means the complete list. Jeremy got a whole chapter to himself. There were several other roommates that don’t make the list because I cannot remember their names or they didn’t live with me long enough to do something really stupid that I can remember. Some of them actually did some really dastardly or stupid things, but since they were around for such a short stretch of time, they don’t really belong in my hall of fame. Perhaps they are in somebody else’s.

Jeremy


Jeremy was one of the ne’re-do-wells that I used to run with. The best way to describe him is to imagine Richard Gere and mix him with David Duchovny. I know that this really is not a quality way to describe somebody, but I can definitely say that if you were to take Photoshop and use it to meld Richard and David…you’d end up with Jeremy.

Jeremy was a very gifted artist. I don’t know what he is doing with that talent these days, but when I used to hang out with him, he could draw, paint, sketch, and sculpt with incredible skill. I always liked to work with him because he gave me tips that were always insightful; it was if he could see what I was struggling with and could fix it with a few deft maneuvers. I may not have become a great artist, but at least Jeremy showed me how to draw and how to use acrylic paints with enough ability to pretty much express what I wanted whenever I wanted. No, Jeremy was the talent…I lacked the imagination.

Jeremy, like me, also liked to party. Outside of his job, I don’t think I ever say him when he wasn’t stoned. Now, you know that I don’t like pot, but when he smoked it, it didn’t seem to bother me as much as many of the other retards that used to hang out at my apartment. So, after a busy day at work, we would meet at home; Jeremy with a pipe in his hand, me with a 12 pack of whatever cheap ass beer I was hooked on at the moment.

Art and a good buzz seemed to mix for us. We would retire to our basement where I had set up a homemade bar. There Jeremy would paint murals on the cinder-block walls and I would be in charge of the music. It was always a pretty cool time, sitting there watching him paint a huge and malevolent clown face on the wall or something else that his mind was fixated on…and there always seemed to be plenty of fixation.

One day, I came home and heard Jeremy yelling at me from the top of the stairs. He obviously in the shower; I could hear the water running. What is it that he could want me to see in there? My mind raced…I am not gay and I don’t think Jeremy is either, but it was somewhat weird being asked to go into a shower by a man yelling at you through a steamy doorway.

I entered the bathroom and there was water and sand everywhere. Jeremy had somehow obtained a three-foot tall piece of marble that probably weighed 150 pounds. He had roughed out a feminine shape into the marble and was now using a wad of steel wool to sand the piece in the shower. It cut the dust and kept it out of his lungs, he explained. So there we were, two guys in a shower in our bathing suits, sanding this hunk of marble into a really beautiful female torso…

Oh yeah, he was stoned to high heaven and I am sure I had at least six Pabst blue ribbons before the water turned cold. This all sounds really queer and it is hard to write for me. I guess I am a homophobe.

Things like that happened all the time at the apartment. You never knew what you were going to walk in on. One day, somebody would be hanging Christmas lights, the next day; somebody had stolen a grocery shopping cart from a nearby store and was busy welding it into a coat rack. There was always something crazy going on. But no matter what was going on, somebody was getting high or drunk.

This all happened in 1994-1996. Back when I was fresh out of school for the first time and I had a lot of money and time on my hands. Jeremy was in art school and had a part time job working at a medical supply company. During the tail end of 1996, a major marijuana farm in Ohio was found and destroyed by police. At first, the prices for pot skyrocketed around where we lived. Finally, the pot ran out and nobody could get anything.

I noticed a change begin to take over Jeremy. He stopped painting around the house. He stopped sculpting in the bathroom. He stopped playing with modeling clay. It seemed as if the artistic life had been sucked out of him. I would come home and Jeremy would be sitting in front of the television, a beer in one hand, the remote in the other. He had lost whatever it was that had given him that spark. He had also not smoked pot for about five weeks. I would like to say that the two instances were somehow related; that because of the pot shortage, Jeremy was just feeling down because he couldn’t relax the way he was used too. I am not sure I can say that though. I think more sinister things were at work in the apartment.

First off, around that time I was dating somebody who was really needy. I was expected to do things that didn’t fit in with the way things had been going. Jeremy didn’t understand, and looking back now, I don’t understand why I was such a tool either. Next, I was drinking a lot more than I had been. If a little was this much fun, then a lot would be a heck of a lot more fun! That always seems to be my downfall with alcohol…I know when to quit, but why? Finally, Jeremy had gotten a promotion at his medical company job. He was now expected to show up on time and to wear a tie. The people he was working with understood that he would not be there forever, but they were locked into careers at the place. They were total assholes to him because he could escape.

That didn’t help him at the moment though. Being stuck with a bunch of backstabbing douche bags isn’t productive and it is not a pleasant way to spend eight hours of work. He came home and threw things. He came home and went straight to the basement to pour himself a drink and sulk. He didn’t want to go to class anymore. He stopped sketching. Work was turning Jeremy into an automaton that could only be miserable.

I would like to say that the story of Jeremy has a happy ending. It does not. The pot drought went on, extending for at least another six months and cutting Jeremy off from his stress relief valve. He seemed to grow more distant as each payday went by…knowing that he was not going to be able to purchase his precious sack of bud; even though he tried and tried.

We had our continued differences as well. The night he came home to me drunk and trying to burn down a stack of beer cans was probably the straw that broke the camel’s back, but I am not sure. See, he was pissed that I had used up all his acrylic glue for the stack and I think he was more mad about that than the actual fire burning out of control in our living room. Don’t worry, I bought him a new can of the stuff.

Finally, after having had it with me and not being able to smoke pot, Jeremy moved into some girl’s house. I helped him move and the new place was tiny. I am not sure if they were sleeping together at that time, but I am sure that she had designs on him. He had no place to set up and paint or sculpt. It all seemed like some sort of twisted plan. I felt sorry for him.

A few months later, Jeremy called me. He wanted to get together and go out. He said that he had a few days off, some extra cash, and he was growing tired of the girl he had moved in with…but yes, she was pregnant and they were going to be married. He explained that this night out was going to be our last hurrah.

We met at this old bar we used to hang out in back in our “salad days.” In the parking lot, before we entered the building, Jeremy pulled out his pipe and a small sack of pot. He stuffed the marijuana into the bowl of the pipe and quickly smoked the contents. We then entered the bar and the night was a carbon copy of the hundreds of nights we had gone out before. Jeremy was the same Jeremy.

That was the last time I saw Jeremy except for one time when I passed him in traffic. He waved at me, I waved at him, and we didn’t speak. But that night was really “it.” He went on with his own life and I went on with mine. After the bar had closed down, one of our friends suggested that we go to a local fast food joint for some after-hours grub. Jeremy and I agreed. It seemed as if he didn’t want the night to end. About six of us piled into somebody’s car.

On the way to the fast food place, I thought it would be a good idea to smoke a cigarette. I brought out my pack and lighted a smoke without paying attention to what I was doing. A small part of the cigarette fell onto the flannel shirt I was wearing. The car stopped at a very busy intersection, stuck in the left turn lane while we waited for oncoming traffic to clear.

“Dan!!!” Somebody in the front seat yelled. I glanced up from being drunk and stupid and realized that the whole front of my shirt was on fire. “OH SHIT” I yelled and jumped out into the intersection, wildly slapping at the fire on my clothes.

Jeremy thought this was insanely funny and got out to help. Somehow, while he was climbing out of the car, he decided that he needed to go to the bathroom.

That is the last really clear memory of my old friend. The whole scene played out in the middle of a busy intersection. Me slapping myself because I am on fire and him, pants around his ankles as he pisses on the pavement.

Homemade Salsa - My Way

Remember that time I told you I would type out some recipes? Well, that was five minutes ago in my time and it might be a few seconds ago depending on when you read this chapter. I wracked my brain for my favorite recipe and (with my friend’s approval) I decided to give out one of my most precious secrets…my fresh salsa recipe. This salsa isn’t like the crap you get in a jar, and I have been told by people that once they have tried my salsa, they are forever ruined from eating jar salsa. I don’t know if I agree with them, I think that jarred salsa has it’s place…it’s far easier than homemade stuff and I think it is tasty anyways.

But this salsa, the homemade stuff, is a magical concoction. The recipe goes back hundreds of years and was passed down to me through my grandmother…who whispered the ingredients into my ear as she lay on her deathbed. Not really, I came up with it myself one day when I was putting together a display of fresh tomatoes. I mentioned to my co-worker that they looked pretty good and that I thought I was going to buy some. He agreed and told me that he was also going to buy some and then he was going to make salsa. I was young, probably 17 or 18 and I had never heard of such a thing before. Naturally, I was very curious about how to make the stuff so I asked. He gave me a list of items to buy and then told me to chop everything up. Also, he told me to experiment with peppers to find what kind of temperature I would like. As it turns out, I didn’t like using hot peppers as much as I thought I would. If you read Chapter six, you know how I feel about hot foods, but this is different. When I added peppers to my salsa, it just never tasted right. Also, the kids wouldn’t eat it, so I took to making the salsa separately and then adding some hot sauce to the mix afterwards according to who would be eating it.

So there I was, standing in front of a tiny cutting board with a sub-standard knife in my hand. I had a pile of vegetables and spices I had no idea what to do with…so I started chopping. And that is what you should do too, so without further ado, here is the list of crap you need to buy:

Dan’s Salsa

·Six whole Roma tomatoes (they may call them plum tomatoes in your area)
·One full stalk of celery
·One large sweet onion (I like to use Vidalia onions)
·One bunch of cilantro (check this by smell, you don’t want to buy flat parsley by mistake)
·One green bell pepper
·One yellow bell pepper
·One orange bell pepper (all of these are just for color, if you want, just use three green bell peppers)
·One jalapeño pepper
·Two 16-ounce cans of plain diced tomatoes. Don’t use the doctored type of diced tomatoes; we are going to be spicing the salsa ourselves
·Six large cloves of garlic
·The juice of one lemon
·The juice of one lime
·Salt and pepper

Take all of the vegetables and chop them up so that they are about a quarter inch square. You really don’t need to do this that drastically, but I do it. put everything into a big pot, this recipe makes about a gallon of salsa, so make sure you have a big enough pot…I use a 6 quart soup pot. Mince your garlic and add that. Cut your cilantro as fine as you can and add that. Some people don’t like cilantro evident in their food, but I do, so I cut it somewhat large. Juice the lemon and the lime and be careful not to let the seeds get in your salsa. add the cans of diced tomato last. Depending on how juicy the mix is, you may want to drain the diced tomatoes. If you like your salsa with a lot of liquid in it like I do, then just toss both cans in without draining them. A note about the bell peppers: I put some of their seeds into the salsa because it gives the salsa a bit of “authenticity.” Let this whole mess stand covered on a counter top for about an hour to let the lemon and lime juices “cook” the softer veggies. Salt and pepper everything according to taste and if you like some zip, add about six big dashes of hot sauce to the mix. Stir everything very vigorously every fifteen minutes to keep the “cooking” going. After about an hour, your salsa should be done and ready to enjoy.

I usually just eat it with store bought chips, but you can make your own tortillas if you like. Take a pack of pre-made ones and bake them in the oven until they begin to turn brown.

Once everything is done and thoroughly mixed in the pot and it has had time to sit, eat as much of it as you can and then put it away. Since there are a lot of veggies in this that are breaking down due to the acidity of the lemons, limes and tomatoes, the mix will get old fast. Because this is such an expensive mix, you want to get it into the fridge as soon as you are done eating because it will go bad very quickly.

There are several variations on this salsa. some people like to make it with mangos and some people like to add roasted corn to it. It’s okay to do it that way I guess, but I am one of those types that just likes the original. Grandmother would be proud.

Homemade Salsa - My Way

Remember that time I told you I would type out some recipes? Well, that was five minutes ago in my time and it might be a few seconds ago depending on when you read this chapter. I wracked my brain for my favorite recipe and (with my friend’s approval) I decided to give out one of my most precious secrets…my fresh salsa recipe. This salsa isn’t like the crap you get in a jar, and I have been told by people that once they have tried my salsa, they are forever ruined from eating jar salsa. I don’t know if I agree with them, I think that jarred salsa has it’s place…it’s far easier than homemade stuff and I think it is tasty anyways.

But this salsa, the homemade stuff, is a magical concoction. The recipe goes back hundreds of years and was passed down to me through my grandmother…who whispered the ingredients into my ear as she lay on her deathbed. Not really, I came up with it myself one day when I was putting together a display of fresh tomatoes. I mentioned to my co-worker that they looked pretty good and that I thought I was going to buy some. He agreed and told me that he was also going to buy some and then he was going to make salsa. I was young, probably 17 or 18 and I had never heard of such a thing before. Naturally, I was very curious about how to make the stuff so I asked. He gave me a list of items to buy and then told me to chop everything up. Also, he told me to experiment with peppers to find what kind of temperature I would like. As it turns out, I didn’t like using hot peppers as much as I thought I would. If you read Chapter six, you know how I feel about hot foods, but this is different. When I added peppers to my salsa, it just never tasted right. Also, the kids wouldn’t eat it, so I took to making the salsa separately and then adding some hot sauce to the mix afterwards according to who would be eating it.

So there I was, standing in front of a tiny cutting board with a sub-standard knife in my hand. I had a pile of vegetables and spices I had no idea what to do with…so I started chopping. And that is what you should do too, so without further ado, here is the list of crap you need to buy:

Dan’s Salsa

·Six whole Roma tomatoes (they may call them plum tomatoes in your area)
·One full stalk of celery
·One large sweet onion (I like to use Vidalia onions)
·One bunch of cilantro (check this by smell, you don’t want to buy flat parsley by mistake)
·One green bell pepper
·One yellow bell pepper
·One orange bell pepper (all of these are just for color, if you want, just use three green bell peppers)
·One jalapeño pepper
·Two 16-ounce cans of plain diced tomatoes. Don’t use the doctored type of diced tomatoes; we are going to be spicing the salsa ourselves
·Six large cloves of garlic
·The juice of one lemon
·The juice of one lime
·Salt and pepper

Take all of the vegetables and chop them up so that they are about a quarter inch square. You really don’t need to do this that drastically, but I do it. put everything into a big pot, this recipe makes about a gallon of salsa, so make sure you have a big enough pot…I use a 6 quart soup pot. Mince your garlic and add that. Cut your cilantro as fine as you can and add that. Some people don’t like cilantro evident in their food, but I do, so I cut it somewhat large. Juice the lemon and the lime and be careful not to let the seeds get in your salsa. add the cans of diced tomato last. Depending on how juicy the mix is, you may want to drain the diced tomatoes. If you like your salsa with a lot of liquid in it like I do, then just toss both cans in without draining them. A note about the bell peppers: I put some of their seeds into the salsa because it gives the salsa a bit of “authenticity.” Let this whole mess stand covered on a counter top for about an hour to let the lemon and lime juices “cook” the softer veggies. Salt and pepper everything according to taste and if you like some zip, add about six big dashes of hot sauce to the mix. Stir everything very vigorously every fifteen minutes to keep the “cooking” going. After about an hour, your salsa should be done and ready to enjoy.

I usually just eat it with store bought chips, but you can make your own tortillas if you like. Take a pack of pre-made ones and bake them in the oven until they begin to turn brown.

Once everything is done and thoroughly mixed in the pot and it has had time to sit, eat as much of it as you can and then put it away. Since there are a lot of veggies in this that are breaking down due to the acidity of the lemons, limes and tomatoes, the mix will get old fast. Because this is such an expensive mix, you want to get it into the fridge as soon as you are done eating because it will go bad very quickly.

There are several variations on this salsa. some people like to make it with mangos and some people like to add roasted corn to it. It’s okay to do it that way I guess, but I am one of those types that just likes the original. Grandmother would be proud.

On Being Poor

In my life, I have been rich, semi-rich, poor, and dirt poor. Being rich is easy; don’t let them tell you that it isn’t. Don’t let them actually smile and tell you that with money you just have bigger problems. It’s a bunch of bullshit that rich people tell middle class yokels so that they can either “fit in” with them or commiserate with them at the company picnic. Anybody who can keep a straight face and tell you that having money is trouble is either a liar or insane. Money is good to have no matter what they tell you; with it, you can play act as if you are dirt poor if you want, but if you don’t have cash, it’s no game.

The two middle categories: semi-rich and poor equate to being middle class. Either you are so close to striking it rich that you can taste it or you are living beyond your means and you are gonna hit the poorhouse as soon as your creditors catch up with you. I can’t really tell you much about these middle categories; I wasn’t part of them long enough to gain a proper opinion. I sure as hell can tell you about being rich or being poor though, I’ve spent literally years studying the phenomena…

Since this article is entitled “On Being Poor,” I think you can figure out what category about which I am going to be speaking. Dirt poor sucks ass, but to look back on it is quite fun; as most of these articles try to be. Looking back, the armchair quarterback, hindsight is 20-20, etc …fun.

When you are dirt poor, you learn to do several things that you wouldn’t think of doing when you are rich. Being dirt poor is almost like exercising your mind; you have to think a lot more about what you do, how you live, and who else is around you making you the way you are. Take, for example, the way a poor person feeds him or herself. They tend to buy bulk items that are cheap, sweet, and fattening. It was a saying between managers when I worked in the hood: “if it’s cheap, sweet or fat, it belongs on an end-display.” Chances are, if it fit those criteria and was on that end-display, you would sell out of the item.

For most of my career in the ghetto stores, I was a dairy manager. In the dairy departments of most stores, they have large sections of the “healthy” products and smaller sections of less healthy items. A prime example of this was the milk. Whole milk (sometimes erroneously called “vitamin D milk”) usually has around 4% fat. In a normal store in a normal neighborhood, I would have a setting with two facings (16 jugs of milk on the shelf) of that kind of milk. I wasn’t going to run out because health-conscious shoppers weren’t going to buy that particular kind…it had too much fat in it. In a store in the ghetto, where I was serving dirt-poor customers, I had a setting of whole milk that had 40 facings (over three hundred jugs of milk on the shelf—and I had to constantly keep an eye on it). I was going to sell that much!

You think that was bad? Just think of the yogurt section…even the kid’s flavors practically rotted on the shelf. Meanwhile, over in the more affluent portions of town, you can’t keep yogurt on the shelf. If a major brand goes on sale, it gets even crazier. I have seen customers step on each other to get a cup of Yoplait off the shelf. Yogurt is seen and has been proven to be a healthy treat, so the yuppies are going to buy it. A dirt-poor slob looks at it as an expensive tiny-portioned item. If you are going to buy a little cup of yogurt for a dollar, you might as well spend a couple extra bucks and get a gallon-sized tub of cheap ice cream.

But I am not going to sit here comparing what people think about items based on their annual income. What I want to do is try to jot down some of the more fun and entertaining ways I made dollars stretch when I was one of those dirt-poor slobs I was talking about earlier.

I have always been able to look into a kitchen cabinet or icebox and find things to make a meal that is reasonably tasty and quick. It doesn’t matter what's in the cupboard, I usually can whip something up that is tasty…even if the only ingredients I have are ketchup, taco seasoning, canned tuna, and a bag of rice, people seem to think my cooking is okay given what I have on hand. One of my favorite things to do when I need lots of food that tastes good, but I don’t have a lot of money, is to make BBQ pork sandwiches. A good-sized pork roast like a Boston butt or a pork picnic roast is around six bucks. You roast that thing in the oven or a pressure cooker for a few hours and then you dump some BBQ sauce on it and you wind up with a tasty meal. The whole thing costs around ten bucks (including the buns for the sandwiches) and you can feed about six people with the resulting mess. Or, if you are like me, you can feed off the stuff for three days if you keep it in the refrigerator.

Another way to stretch a meal is to add rice or noodles to it. Yeah, that’s and easy one, but it’s also a tip that many people forget. Buying processed foods like canned chili, canned soups, and frozen sauces is cost efficient, but by adding rice or noodles, you can stretch that efficiency a lot further. One of my favorites is to take a can of Dinty Moore beef stew (the big can—I think off the top of my head it is 46 ounces) and heat it up. Most people don’t like this crap, but for some reason, I am partial to it. Being poor means you don’t especially have to give a crap about being healthy, and this meal is definitely not healthy, but it will get you through a few days until you can buy some healthier stuff to eat. Anyways, you heat up that can of beef stew and you make a few cups of rice. Mix them together and you have a meal that will feed at least four people for under six dollars.

Somebody in the peanut gallery mentioned that I should talk about making healthy food for cheap. Well, there aren’t many choices here; healthy food (for the most part) is expensive. Fresh vegetables, lower fat foods and diet items are all marketed towards rich people or the children of rich people, but I can think of a few ways to make some healthy food for cheap. The first thing that comes to mind is a plain veggie tray. That’s right, just cut up some carrots, celery, and green peppers. If you are feeling particularly outlandish or have a few extra bucks, you can add cauliflower or broccoli. If you buy all these things in bulk (bulk carrots are about 300% cheaper than those bags of baby carrots) then cut up and store them when you first get home from the store, you can make snacks that will last a week in the fridge if you take care of them. To take care of them, put them in Tupperware bowls (you’ve been saving those lunchmeat bowls and old margarine tubs haven’t you? Yes, you have, you are poor) cover them with a wet paper towel. The towel doesn’t need to be dripping wet, just damp. Cover the whole thing with the Cool Whip lid and put in the fridge. By doing this, your snacks will last much longer.

While I was typing this, another cheap way to stretch your dollar and still manage to get good nutrition is to buy cauliflower and use it as an ingredient. Sure, a head of cauliflower is expensive, but you just don’t realize how much food is there. Pick up a head of the stuff the next time you are in a store…I bet it weighs at least five pounds. Even stripped of the leaves and the stalk, there is an incredible amount food packed in there. Boil it, add it too soups, deep-fry it, stir-fry it, roast it with garlic, put it in a salad, or just eat it raw right off of the head…

This goes for broccoli too, and don’t get rid of the long stem that comes with broccoli…it is edible as well, and it tastes just fine.

Also, buying frozen vegetables in the little blocks is a good way to get vitamins in your diet on the cheap. Don’t mess with those bags of frozen veggie mixes like “Schezuan stir fry” or “California style vegetables” what you want is the plain old square blocks. Most of them sell for about 89 cents and are about the most efficient food item in the store. A pack of broccoli spears will help feed three people by adding a side dish and if you cook it on the stove rather than in the microwave, it tastes pretty good too. A brief note on veggies: avoid using the microwave on them, if you have a stove, use that. They turn out less rubbery and they taste a heck of a lot better.

When making a salad, don’t buy the bagged lettuces. They are way over priced and they give you about (realistically) two servings per bag. The best way to make a salad on the cheap is to buy a head of iceberg lettuce and then toss in some of your favorite greens (also purchased bulk rather than in the bag). A head of iceberg, even in rough economic times, is never more than a buck—at least I have never seen it get that high. Even if you do run into an expensive price on lettuce, there usually is somewhere where they put the “day old” lettuce that they have trimmed back to get rid of the brown spots, and this stuff is around fifty cents. If you do run into wilted lettuce, a good way to “snap it back” to crisp is to soak it in a bath of ice water over night in the fridge.

Finally, where all this cheap food has been leading us to is the king of all cheap foods: the casserole. With a good casserole, you can feed ten people for under ten bucks or you can feed yourself for a week. Most of them are pretty good as well; all they are is a bunch of cheese, noodles, ground beef, and some sort of sauce. Here is my all time favorite: roast a pack of chicken parts. I usually use the “Pick-of-the-Chick” pack, it has a whole chicken cut up with the skin and bones. I roast that with a bit of pepper and salt, then I shred the whole thing up just like I was making BBQ. Next, you take a few cups of rice and boil them. Mix the rice and the chicken; cover the whole mess with a cup of salsa and some cheese. To stretch your dollar, buy the blocks of cheese rather than the bags of shredded. If you shred cheese yourself, you save a lot of money because the bags are much more expensive. Once you have all your ingredients mixed, add the cheese to the top and bake in an oven for one hour at 350 degrees. This mess will serve at least six people and shouldn’t cost more than twenty bucks.

I suppose I should put together a list of my recipes. I think I may do just that, see that’s the beauty of writing, you can do stuff later when you think about it.

Grocery Store II

The Deli

We left off at the bakery department. Usually running along the same side of the power alley as the bakery is the deli department. They often present themselves together, running as a continuous service counter behind all sorts of goodies. The deli specializes in cut luncheon meats, cheeses, prepared salads, pastas, and cold prepared foods that are quick and easy to heat up and enjoy. The deli, or if you prefer, the “prepared foods section,” doesn’t stop there. The department, when in a larger store, has whole hot cases serving fried and baked chicken, ribs, soups, taco bars, Asian specialties, and appetizers. Often, these hot cases are self-serve or buffet style offerings that are paid for at a cash register at the end of the case. Other times you will find a friendly service clerk behind the case, manning a spoon and large containers for you to keep your purchases in.

The Deli department is much like the bakery in that it is a service department where most of the items you see are either thawed out or cooked right on the premises rather than sold as a contained item. Also, like the bakery the counter is maintained by a staff of workers who should be properly trained and have a full knowledge of the items they are serving.

But the deli doesn’t stop there. In some of the more upscale grocery stores that I have seen, the deli keeps a chef on hand and he cooks a menu each day that will be chilled and sold out of a “prepared meals” case. These guys cook all day and if the store is busy, the prepared meals case is a very popular section of the deli. In the last store I worked in, there was not only a chef, there was also what was called a “food-marketing specialist.”

The food-marketing specialist was a highly trained chef or dietician who was on the premises to showcase ingredients and items that were rare or misunderstood. They were trained by the store to have knowledge in wines, desserts, and many other aspects of a “fine meal.” They were also in charge of educating the whole store’s staff about seasonal or special products. In my particular store, the food-marketing manager held several meetings where we were encouraged to try new things and to learn about those things uses. A knowledgeable staff is very important when it comes to serving the customer.

And all of that is wrapped up in the deli. I still find it hard to believe that when I started working in grocery stores in 1984 the deli was a small hole in the wall. A person would walk up to the hole, place an order, and then go about shopping. Sometime during the shopper’s trip at the store, a call would go out over the loudspeakers telling them that their order was ready. Today, the amount of real estate, time, and energy devoted to that hole in the wall rivals the rest of the store. With that much invested, you have to realize that the prices are insane. Seven dollars for a pint of salsa?

The Butcher’s Shop

Most meat departments have a service counter that handles both cut meats and seafood. They have a long cold case that features pork, chicken, beef, lunch meats, sausages, and some prepared food items like shredded taco flavored chicken.

The service counter is where you find your higher grades of beef cuts. Angus, Choice, and Prime go in there and the prices reflect that. The seafood is separate but nearby. Cuts of fresh water, salt water and shellfishes are all located here, pre-thawed and ready to take home.

Behind that counter is a large bank of windows. Unlike the bakery or the deli, almost all of the fresh meat in a butcher’s shop is prepared on site back behind those windows. Starting at about six o’clock in the morning, you will see butchers arrive and begin to cut beef, grind tubes of ground beef, package pork and run the band saw on the larger hunks of meat they get in almost every day on refrigerated trucks. Those butchers are back there cutting all day. Also, they do what is called “cutting forward” to make sure that the department has fresh sale items and popular cuts for the rest of the sales day.

After you move past the butcher shop and the service counter, there is usually a long bank of coolers that hold the ground beef, steaks, chicken, and pork. This straightaway is where most of the sale items and “lesser” grades of meat can be found. This set of cases is also the reason why those butchers are cutting meat like mad. This case is where 80% of the meat in the store is purchased. Not as pricey as the actual service counter, but many great cuts of meat are still to be had here.

After that set of coolers, there is a section of pre-made dinner solutions. This is a rapidly expanding part of the industry that is comparable to the produce department’s bagged salad section. The whole point of this type of food is that it is convenient and quick for the customer. All that ease is nice, but as I said before, you are going to get socked in the wallet for all that hassle free cooking you are going to be doing. The meal solutions products you will find here are noodles and chicken, beef tips in gravy, taco meat, chicken strips ready to eat, spaghetti variations and some types of casseroles. All very nice and neatly packaged up ready for your microwave.

I really don’t think that people are that much busier these days, they are just that much lazier.

After the meal solutions, you find a huge section of lunchmeats, sausages, hot dogs, and smoked meats. This section has almost no service involved. None of these products are made on the store premises and they come packaged in cardboard as if they just left the plant where they were made. It is just like a regular shelf in the grocery department with processed foods that need to be kept cold.

Most stores have a small frozen meat section. If there is one, it will be located near the lunchmeats or it will be in the actual frozen food section of the store. In this section, you will find frozen poultry, seafood, processed chicken patties and frozen ribs. You may also find some more meal solutions items over here that come frozen and in bags.

The Dairy Department

The dairy department (along with the frozen food department) used to be under the umbrella of the grocery department. What this means is that the dairy gets most of its stuff delivered by the same guys who deliver the dry goods that you find in the middle of the store. All that stuff comes from the same warehouse or warehouse complex.

Most of the dairy department doesn’t really need an explanation. It is what it is. If you have seen one, chances are you are not going to be surprised by anything if you walk into a new store. There is one exception…the milk section.

Milk is sometimes kept separate and shipped to the store on different trucks or is shipped directly to the store by a milk company truck driver. They do this to maintain the freshness of the product, but in reality, a central hub warehouse can put the product in the store with just as much speed.

The milk section has grown like a weed over the last ten years. There used to be four main types of dairy milk and a few creams and coffee creamers. During the 1990’s this section exploded with the advent or mainstreaming of several items that were only considered special order items before. Rice milks, soymilks, flavored coffee creamers, non-dairy creamers, lactose free milks…this whole section literally exploded with new items that are usually high ticket and aimed at the younger crowd of shoppers.

With the success of that section, the rest of the dairy department seems to be undergoing a change of a similar way. Where once a large section of individually wrapped cheese slices was is now a shelf of upscale cheeses. The introduction of specialty juices and yogurts has revolutionized the way the modern shopper looks at the dairy department.

Still, above it all, the dairy is usually in the back corner of the store. You have to pass everything else just to get milk for your corn flakes. Why is this? Well, first off, I explained the concept of a loss leader earlier. I should probably explain the concept of putting the milk in the back with scientific terms, but it’s just plain and simple: they want you to see everything…the impulse purchases…before you are allowed to get to what you really need.

There have been very little changes done to the dairy outside of the things I have mentioned. The eggs, butter, and biscuit sections are all pretty much the same. There are small exceptions, most notably in the egg section. Now you can buy free-range eggs, cholesterol free eggs, homogenized eggs, and vitamin fortified eggs. Again, the industry is attempting to gratify the younger shoppers…who for the most part have some expendable income.


Next tour installment: center store grocery, health and beauty aids, beer and wine…

Grocery Store II

The Deli

We left off at the bakery department. Usually running along the same side of the power alley as the bakery is the deli department. They often present themselves together, running as a continuous service counter behind all sorts of goodies. The deli specializes in cut luncheon meats, cheeses, prepared salads, pastas, and cold prepared foods that are quick and easy to heat up and enjoy. The deli, or if you prefer, the “prepared foods section,” doesn’t stop there. The department, when in a larger store, has whole hot cases serving fried and baked chicken, ribs, soups, taco bars, Asian specialties, and appetizers. Often, these hot cases are self-serve or buffet style offerings that are paid for at a cash register at the end of the case. Other times you will find a friendly service clerk behind the case, manning a spoon and large containers for you to keep your purchases in.

The Deli department is much like the bakery in that it is a service department where most of the items you see are either thawed out or cooked right on the premises rather than sold as a contained item. Also, like the bakery the counter is maintained by a staff of workers who should be properly trained and have a full knowledge of the items they are serving.

But the deli doesn’t stop there. In some of the more upscale grocery stores that I have seen, the deli keeps a chef on hand and he cooks a menu each day that will be chilled and sold out of a “prepared meals” case. These guys cook all day and if the store is busy, the prepared meals case is a very popular section of the deli. In the last store I worked in, there was not only a chef, there was also what was called a “food-marketing specialist.”

The food-marketing specialist was a highly trained chef or dietician who was on the premises to showcase ingredients and items that were rare or misunderstood. They were trained by the store to have knowledge in wines, desserts, and many other aspects of a “fine meal.” They were also in charge of educating the whole store’s staff about seasonal or special products. In my particular store, the food-marketing manager held several meetings where we were encouraged to try new things and to learn about those things uses. A knowledgeable staff is very important when it comes to serving the customer.

And all of that is wrapped up in the deli. I still find it hard to believe that when I started working in grocery stores in 1984 the deli was a small hole in the wall. A person would walk up to the hole, place an order, and then go about shopping. Sometime during the shopper’s trip at the store, a call would go out over the loudspeakers telling them that their order was ready. Today, the amount of real estate, time, and energy devoted to that hole in the wall rivals the rest of the store. With that much invested, you have to realize that the prices are insane. Seven dollars for a pint of salsa?

The Butcher’s Shop

Most meat departments have a service counter that handles both cut meats and seafood. They have a long cold case that features pork, chicken, beef, lunch meats, sausages, and some prepared food items like shredded taco flavored chicken.

The service counter is where you find your higher grades of beef cuts. Angus, Choice, and Prime go in there and the prices reflect that. The seafood is separate but nearby. Cuts of fresh water, salt water and shellfishes are all located here, pre-thawed and ready to take home.

Behind that counter is a large bank of windows. Unlike the bakery or the deli, almost all of the fresh meat in a butcher’s shop is prepared on site back behind those windows. Starting at about six o’clock in the morning, you will see butchers arrive and begin to cut beef, grind tubes of ground beef, package pork and run the band saw on the larger hunks of meat they get in almost every day on refrigerated trucks. Those butchers are back there cutting all day. Also, they do what is called “cutting forward” to make sure that the department has fresh sale items and popular cuts for the rest of the sales day.

After you move past the butcher shop and the service counter, there is usually a long bank of coolers that hold the ground beef, steaks, chicken, and pork. This straightaway is where most of the sale items and “lesser” grades of meat can be found. This set of cases is also the reason why those butchers are cutting meat like mad. This case is where 80% of the meat in the store is purchased. Not as pricey as the actual service counter, but many great cuts of meat are still to be had here.

After that set of coolers, there is a section of pre-made dinner solutions. This is a rapidly expanding part of the industry that is comparable to the produce department’s bagged salad section. The whole point of this type of food is that it is convenient and quick for the customer. All that ease is nice, but as I said before, you are going to get socked in the wallet for all that hassle free cooking you are going to be doing. The meal solutions products you will find here are noodles and chicken, beef tips in gravy, taco meat, chicken strips ready to eat, spaghetti variations and some types of casseroles. All very nice and neatly packaged up ready for your microwave.

I really don’t think that people are that much busier these days, they are just that much lazier.

After the meal solutions, you find a huge section of lunchmeats, sausages, hot dogs, and smoked meats. This section has almost no service involved. None of these products are made on the store premises and they come packaged in cardboard as if they just left the plant where they were made. It is just like a regular shelf in the grocery department with processed foods that need to be kept cold.

Most stores have a small frozen meat section. If there is one, it will be located near the lunchmeats or it will be in the actual frozen food section of the store. In this section, you will find frozen poultry, seafood, processed chicken patties and frozen ribs. You may also find some more meal solutions items over here that come frozen and in bags.

The Dairy Department

The dairy department (along with the frozen food department) used to be under the umbrella of the grocery department. What this means is that the dairy gets most of its stuff delivered by the same guys who deliver the dry goods that you find in the middle of the store. All that stuff comes from the same warehouse or warehouse complex.

Most of the dairy department doesn’t really need an explanation. It is what it is. If you have seen one, chances are you are not going to be surprised by anything if you walk into a new store. There is one exception…the milk section.

Milk is sometimes kept separate and shipped to the store on different trucks or is shipped directly to the store by a milk company truck driver. They do this to maintain the freshness of the product, but in reality, a central hub warehouse can put the product in the store with just as much speed.

The milk section has grown like a weed over the last ten years. There used to be four main types of dairy milk and a few creams and coffee creamers. During the 1990’s this section exploded with the advent or mainstreaming of several items that were only considered special order items before. Rice milks, soymilks, flavored coffee creamers, non-dairy creamers, lactose free milks…this whole section literally exploded with new items that are usually high ticket and aimed at the younger crowd of shoppers.

With the success of that section, the rest of the dairy department seems to be undergoing a change of a similar way. Where once a large section of individually wrapped cheese slices was is now a shelf of upscale cheeses. The introduction of specialty juices and yogurts has revolutionized the way the modern shopper looks at the dairy department.

Still, above it all, the dairy is usually in the back corner of the store. You have to pass everything else just to get milk for your corn flakes. Why is this? Well, first off, I explained the concept of a loss leader earlier. I should probably explain the concept of putting the milk in the back with scientific terms, but it’s just plain and simple: they want you to see everything…the impulse purchases…before you are allowed to get to what you really need.

There have been very little changes done to the dairy outside of the things I have mentioned. The eggs, butter, and biscuit sections are all pretty much the same. There are small exceptions, most notably in the egg section. Now you can buy free-range eggs, cholesterol free eggs, homogenized eggs, and vitamin fortified eggs. Again, the industry is attempting to gratify the younger shoppers…who for the most part have some expendable income.


Next tour installment: center store grocery, health and beauty aids, beer and wine…

Baseball II

People always give me a ton of crap about my baseball team. Yes, I like the New York Yankees and no, I have never lived in New York. I can like whoever I want without having to explain myself; this is still the United States of America, right?

But to diffuse any sort of berating or name-calling, I can actually link and explain why I like the New York Yankees. I grew up in Columbus, Ohio and we have a minor league team here called the Columbus Clippers. Up until a few years ago, the Clippers (who are now the Cleveland Indians farm team) were a farm system team that supplied players to the Yankees. A lot of the current Yankees that are playing now came up through Columbus. I got to see some of the greats play here for a four-dollar ticket.

Some guys who came through here are headed for the baseball Hall of Fame. Players like Mariano Rivera and Derek Jeter are pretty much shoe-ins for Cooperstown and I saw them on the field at lonely Clipper (Cooper) stadium. The list of players I saw her who went on to become great in the major leagues is kinda large now that I think about it. Here is a list:

·Steve Balboni
·Deion Sanders
·Melky Cabrera
·Chien-Ming Wang
·Robinson Canó
·Bubba Crosby
·Derek Jeter
·Don Mattingly
·Otis Nixon
·Andy Pettitte
·Andy Phillips
·Jorge Posada
·Dave Righetti
·Mariano Rivera
·Alfonso Soriano
·Bernie Williams
·Darryl Strawberry
·Carlos Peña

That’s a pretty impressive list considering the Clippers and Yankees had only a 27-year relationship. Looking over that list, I can see possibly three more Hall of Famers who might or might not be actually voted into the Hall. And I got to watch all of them play at least once. That is why I like the Yankees and that is why I still root for them even though they no longer have a relationship with the Clippers. I even got to see Bucky Dent coach…so take that Sox fans.

Grocery Store I

I have told you countless times in my previous articles that I used to work in a grocery store. My duties were various and did work in all of the departments that a grocery store has. Think of a big box store as a common open-air market place, you can even imagine it being somewhere in old Europe if that helps. There are vegetable vendors, meat vendors, bread and wine vendors; they all come to market ready to sell you their wares and they have knowledge in their particular area of expertise.

Now imagine that this market place has mayor. This mayor is around to bind all the vendors into a common peaceful objective (profit) while also maintaining order and competition between the various little shops within his sphere of influence. He also has the task of helping customers find what they need. The only difference between one of those old style markets and today’s big box store is that they are all owned by a common company and they all have a central check-out area.

The mayor is in charge of that checkout area too. He makes sure it is peopled with knowledgeable and courteous wait staff and he is in charge of their payroll and scheduling. In fact, he is in charge of the entire market’s hiring and payroll, but it isn’t all that different from what has come before in the past. It’s just that today’s grocery stores of today don’t have dogs running around barking at the customers or chickens standing on top of the stalls…

Oh, there are a lot of modern major changes in today’s grocery stores, but that is not what I am focusing on. I could go on and on about networked register computer systems, Wi-Fi hot spots in the café, bulk coffee ground by computer driven machines, self checkout scanners, and some of the other vast improvements that have been made in (even) the last five years.

Scanners and cart collection machines are newfangled and nice, but when you boil it all down, the customer is getting the same thing while walking around an open-air market. A person who wants cheese and eggs still has to walk into the market, walk to the items he wants, put them in a cart, and then go and get checked out by a cashier. The same amount of people still throng the market and the same amount of vendors hawk their merchandise…yesterday they screamed prices, today they use the P.A. system.

Now that I have painted a picture that attempts to demystify the overall air of technology involved in a grocery store, I want to give a tour of that same place. Over the years I received a lot of questions about things that I thought (coming from an insider’s view) were rather obvious. Customers wanted to know why the store was set up the way it was, wanted to know about product placement and they wanted to know about sale items and sizes. This article and the articles that shall come later will attempt to answer those questions. Let’s start the tour.

The Lobby

The lobby of a store for many years was just a place to put the unused carts, advertisement signs, gumball machines and community bulletin boards. Today, even though all those things are probably still in the lobbies of the stores in your area, I bet there are all sorts of other things too.

A few years ago, some brilliant person figured out that the lobby is still sales floor…but it wasn’t being used! Over the next few years you began to see products and promotions in the lobby. Huge displays of sodas and colas began to grow right next to the cart coral, a sample display was handing out free bite-sized pieces of hot pizza right next to a display of firewood… This place was prime real estate, and only high return or loss leaders were put out there.

Just a thought before I go on. Firewood for sale at a grocery store? Only in America can you spend all weekend chopping up twigs and branches from your freshly pruned trees and then head over to the grocery store to buy wood.

Okay, on with the tour. What is a loss leader? A loss leader is an item that does not make a store any money. In fact, it probably loses the store money but what it gains is advertising for the store or it is a necessity that everybody needs. Whatever the item is, it usually draws a customer into a store. Two of the biggest loss leaders I can think of off the top of my head are milk and soda.

Think of the lobby as the store’s bait. It gets your attention and draws you in. There are huge signs, bright pictures and lights, games, snacks and fun all out there. Your kids can play on the quarter horseback riding machine, you can peruse the local want ads while your wife tastes a sample of the latest diet energy water. It’s all designed to get you looking and to get you inside the store. I don’t want to sound like I am sneering at the lobby, you can find a lot of great deals there; especially on lawn furniture at the end of the lawn furniture season, you can pick up a good electric Christmas tree too…

The Produce Department

Most of today’s big box grocery (only) stores are set up on a common plan that has been tested and agreed upon as “the way” to psychologically achieve the most out of the sales floor available. I am dead serious. Somebody came along and did a study on what a store should look like and how it should be set up. Customers during the study were asked what was attractive about the store, what smells they could smell and what conveyed the best values. The produce department is hands down the best way to show wholesome quality. That is why they are at the front and right where the lobby leaves off.

Once you have your cart and your ad, you walk into the produce. Here, you are confronted by walls of dark, warm colors and bright splashes of vegetable color. The tomatoes are lighted to look even redder, the broccoli is displayed to show you how bountiful their heads are. I have even seen stores which have a wet rack that actually rains on the greens…complete with taped thunder and timed flashes of lights. It’s all very Hollywood.

A few years ago, stores used to ice down a wet rack and then pile the veggies on top of that ice in an attractive manner. After a while, even with the coolers running, they rack had to be re-iced and re-trimmed. If you consider that most wet racks are at least 40 feet long, this is a ridiculous amount of work to be doing every couple of hours…but it was done that way for decades because there was no other way and it kept the product at peak freshness for the customer. This wet rack I speak of is where all the various lettuces and greens are kept. If you want arugula for your salad, you are going to be visiting the wet rack.

Today, the wet rack has vastly changed in appearance and functionality. Instead of a bed of ice for the greens to sit on, there is a set of shelves that have an almost bookcase quality to them. The produce is set into the individual places designed for the individual products. Iceberg and romaine lettuce each get a wide and deep space on the shelf, radicchio and Belgian endive are given smaller spots that are more controlled due to the frailty of the product. The more hardy items in this category like collards and cabbages go on the bottom. They aren’t affected as much by the closeness of the cold air blowing on them and they can sit in water for a long time before wilting. Over all of this, a mister sends out a fine spray every so often.

Further on up the rack you will find most of the tuber vegetables with the exception of the potatoes and other tubers that just don’t need much refrigeration. On the wet rack, you will usually see carrots, turnips, parsnips, Brussels sprouts (I know!), beets and the occasional kohlrabi or rutabaga. Celery can usually be found here as well. While some of these veggies don’t need to be kept cold, you will find them in the cold because it is comforting to the customer while at the same time it helps the produce department keep within food service guidelines. More on that later.

Last on the wet rack is the bagged salad section. Only ten years ago, the huge profit of this sort of thing went unrecognized. In a brief time, people have realized that Timesavers like bagged salads are incredibly convenient while also returning a high margin of profit. It is a win/win situation for both the store and the customer. In this section, you can probably find any sort of salad you could imagine. Depending on the season, you will see everything from vegetable trays and “American salad” all the way over to Waldorf salads and fruit cups. Again, the markup is very high on these products, but the convenience is what you are paying for. An adroit shopper who has a little extra time on his or her hands will avoid this section.

Most of the rest of the produce department is made up of tables or free standing stalls that display veggies, juices, fruits, nuts and all sorts of other things that do not need to be misted by a wet rack’s watering system. Some tables are refrigerated and this gives them excellent visibility. They can be moved around on wheels and they can be adjusted to show whatever is on them in a better light. They also make a great place to put a produce department’s sale items on. If it is fall and the leaves are turning, you can bet the tables are loaded with apples, apple cider, gourds, pumpkins and fire starter logs. If it is Christmas time, you can bet the tables are loaded up with melting chocolate, nuts, dried fruits and occasionally dried vines and pinecones for making homemade wreaths. If it is high summer, those same tables are piled high with tomatoes, berries, pound cakes and pitted fruits. You get the picture, those tables are the “all star” of the produce department; doing several jobs depending on what is currently going on.

Behind the rolling tables are the more static tables (that may or may not look like vegetable crates) where the year-round “everybody needs them” variety of goodies are located. Potatoes, onions, bell peppers, chili peppers and squash find their homes on these tables. Tomatoes, during off-season are usually relegated to a section off by themselves due to their fragile nature and the fact that they are a high traffic item—but they are still on a stationary table. Whole sections of fruits are on these immobile tables. When not on sale or in their off season; oranges, apples, grapes, tropical fruits (mango, papaya, star fruit, guava, coconuts, etc), fruit juices and berries are all placed in sections like the shelves in the store. If a particular item is hard to get, you will probably see a very small section of it if you see it at all.

So far I have not mentioned bananas. Bananas are a special case. These wonderful fruits are the number one selling produce item in the world and as such they are a loss leader. It is a foolish produce manager who puts his banana display in the front of his department; they sell so fast and in such quantity, his bottom line will be compromised by their movement. When looking for bananas in a grocery store, the first thing that should come to your mind is “the back.” Sometimes you will find mini displays of bananas around the store. In front of the milk or near the checkout lanes. These mini displays are more for impulse buy.

The Bakery

The bakery is found near the produce. Along with the deli department and a store’s café, the bakery makes up what the industry used to call a “power alley.” This power alley is where all the fresh, wholesome parts of the store are shown off, publicizing the store’s nourishing and natural commitment to its customers. The bakery is part of this because it is a service department. This means that actual labor is done on the premises to produce the items found there. Recently, there has been a trend in many bakeries where cakes, cookies, donuts, bagels, breads and rolls are all brought into the store frozen. They are then thawed out and displayed. While the quality is not what it used to be, convenience is king. A bakery can use less skilled bakers and use that payroll to utilize more service agents. While I don’t agree with this method, I do understand its merit. I purchase my donuts elsewhere because I just can’t get a good donut around here in a grocery store.

If you shop very early in the morning, you will see an actual baker on the premises, but if you are like 90% of the population that makes up shoppers, you probably won’t ever see him or her. This isn’t because they don’t like you, this is because they usually get to work at about midnight and heat up or thaw out their products. It takes a lot of labor to get a bakery up and running for the morning. Out of date products must be removed, close dated products must be marked down, and new products must be displayed strategically. Also, if there is any on site baking actually done, they do it early. This last rule does not apply to brownies and chocolate chip cookies. I’ll explain that later.

The bakery has the same kind of tables as the produce. When they display their hot Italian bread, chances are it is right out where you can get to it and where it’s aroma can get to you…and it is on a moveable table. Pies, pre-packaged cookies, bagged bagels and specialty breads can all be found on these tables as well. Just like the produce, they are set up and moved around according to the season or the holiday that happens to be coming up.

Over by the bakery counter, you’ll find the individual donuts, single cookies, baked candies and cakes. These items are a bit more hardy and tend to have a longer shelf life than the items on the tables. They also are items that you or a bakery service person must retrieve from a case that usually has a door on it. Cakes are kept where they can be lighted with the best possible lighting, single cookies and individual donuts are kept behind glass doors to keep fingers off of them but can be easily gotten to by a customer. There is usually a cake decorator around here too. He or she is ready to take your order.

Back behind the counter is the upright frozen case. In this thing you will find frozen cakes, ice creams and sherbets. It’s a good spot to head for if you are hosting a birthday party in the summertime. Just be careful around here, I have always had trouble with my bakery managers when it comes to keeping good dates on the items on the frozen cake shelves. This isn’t a reflection on them as good people, it is more a reflection on the sales that come out of the frozen bakery cases…they are not very busy.

A word about brownies and chocolate chip cookies. Most of the stores I have worked in still make these items on the premises. I don’t want you to think that there is some sinister plot involved, but the coincidences are just too alarming to say that I know for sure. When a store is baking brownies, you can tell. The whole store fills up with an aroma that is seductive, inviting, and alluring. If you are in the store when they open up those ovens, you know what I am talking about…it’s just plain hypnotizing. I can’t think of a better way to get people to think your store is wholesome and fresh. I have heard (jokingly) that the scent of baking brownies in a grocery store is akin to the cheap perfume put on by a hooker. Woe to any shopper who is shopping hungry when they are baking brownies!



Coming up: The Deli, The Butcher’s Shop, the Dairy…