Land of Plenty

Back in the Cold War days, whenever a defector, or even a visitor, from a Communist country was asked what impressed him most about America, he usually said it was the full shelves in the stores. We've all seen pictures or video of the stores in the Communist countries in those days, and their shelves looked like Mother Hubbard's cupboard. One of the first things my father taught me when I worked in his store was to keep the shelves looking full. If we didn't have enough product on hand to fill the shelves, I was told to move everything forward to give the impression of full shelves. My dad said it was a psychological thing. For some reason, people would rather buy from full shelves than from half empty ones. If you're discontinuing a product, the last few items are the hardest ones to sell, nobody wants to buy the last one of anything. If you really want to move something, put it in a bin or basket on the end of the aisle, people like to buy stuff like that as well. It gives the impression that you have so much of the stuff that you can't fit it all on your shelves. Walmart is famous for that. They have so much stuff in the aisles that it's often difficult to get your cart past another customer who has stopped to search for something. That's another thing. With so many different varieties of the same product, it can be hard to find the one you're looking for, especially if they have moved it since the last time you were in the store.

I've often wondered what they do with all the stuff that doesn't sell by its expiration date. They can't possibly sell all the stuff they have out there. I worked briefly in the meat department of one of our local supermarkets. What we did was pull a package just before its sell by date, open it up, and smell it. If it looked and smelled all right, we would repackage it and mark it down to be sure that it would sell before its new sell by date. If it looked a little off, but smelled all right, we would put it in "the grinds", which meant hamburger for beef and sausage for pork. You couldn't do anything with chicken except throw it away, but chicken tends to go bad all at once with no question about it. I don't know what they do with all the other stuff like bread, produce, and canned goods. My father used to call meat that wasn't good enough to sell but too good to throw away "hoga-roga", which is a Czech term that translates literally as "almost gone". He would often bring that hoga-roga stuff home and we would eat it ourselves. There was nothing wrong with it and, in the case of beef, it was frequently better than the fresh stuff.

Another thing like that is the plants that they sell in the spring and early summer. We have several greenhouses in Cheboygan, plus all the supermarkets have a gardening department. I don't think there is enough farm and garden space in the tri-county area to plant all the plants that are offered for sale. I suppose the ones that don't sell get composted, which isn't a total waste, but they must make up the lost revenue by charging more for the plants that they do sell.

We don't have an  Aldi's in Cheboygan, but we've got a Save-a-Lot, which sounds like pretty much the same thing. Their meat is of fine quality and sells for the lowest prices in town. Their groceries are of limited variety but, if you can find what you want, you will save money on it.

I read somewhere about misting your bread while it's baking, but I never have tried it. My bread project is pretty much an all day job as it is, and I'm not anxious to add another step to the process. I hadn't heard about the tray of ice cubes, though. That doesn't sound very time consuming and might be worth a try. I would still need to know how to keep the bread from spreading out into a formless mass if I baked it on a flat surface instead of in bread pans. I tried slicing my loaves upside down today, and I wasn't fond of it. For some reason the slices were all skinny at one end and fat on the other, although I don't know how slicing upside down could cause that. Here's a photo of my loaves before I sliced them.