I will continue to call The Creature “Frankenstein” and no force in Heaven or Earth will impede that.
I also laughed at him totally deliberately calling attention to the fact Victor isn’t a real doctor because he dropped out of college and built a guy out of corpses
Everyone going shopping on Black Friday, be aware of three things:
The retail workers are working 12 hours shifts. We are threatened with losing our jobs if we don’t show up unless we’re dying in the hospital. I had an assistant manager show up with fucking strep because he would’ve been fired otherwise. Yes, he did infect 7 and hospitalize 2 coworkers; who knows how many members of the public he infected.
The stores have, maybe, 5 of that special cheap thing you’re after. Corporate does this on purpose, and stores are not allowed to order enough. The prices aren’t even that much lower. They lie about how expensive something is to fool you into thinking you’re getting a discount. You aren’t.
Most of the workers you will come across will be new hires for the sole purpose of being bodies for about three months before they’re fired. They actually don’t know anything because they’ve been working there for maybe two weeks, and have had no real training. I was once hired at Staples a week before Black Friday and expected to know how to deal with phones, coupons, the online ordering site, and AS400 after five 6-hour shifts. This is the kind of person you will likely be dealing with at Black Friday.
Do me and my retail family a favor and don’t shop Black Friday. Any company that needs a sale day like Black Friday to get their sales out of the red doesn’t deserve to be in business.
This also goes for anyone that works shipment too. We’re suddenly expected to stay as late as they want you to even if they know you don’t have a car and rely on a ride to get you to and from work and know you can’t stay late. Shipment workers will suddenly start getting berated for not getting things done and it is by far the most stressful time to be a shipment worker for any store. Especially when they throw in new hires that don’t know how to process things and are expected to work at the same pace as the people that have worked there for a while.
Retail is shit around the holidays, especially Black Friday
ok fellow millenials, it’s time to kill black friday
LET’S KILL BLACK FRIDAY
I was gonna put this in the tags but it seems relevant.
Try to be super super kind to any service worker in the holiday season. I’ve worked in both retail and foodservice over the holidays, and Thanksgiving and Christmas are the worst times for both. I refuse to decorate for Christmas anymore because of it.
So over the holidays, remember that if you’re gonna be shopping, or taking your family of 10 out to eat, or meeting all your high school friends for coffee, or whatever, to be extra nice to your workers (and tip very well, if applicable). Because a lot of people forget how bad it gets for foodservice workers in this season, and people always need a reminder to be nice to retail workers
And please take the effort to clean up after yourselves. Pick up food or garbage that you see or drop. If you are waited upon, stack your dishes neatly for the wait staff. Be understanding that they’re busy. Tip as generously as you can for these people who are working instead of being with their own family.
Me; The fact that whole wheat flour is more expensive than bleached white flour is elitist bullshit.
Some poor person in the baking aisle of Hy Vee “What?”
My husband; oh no
Me; WELL IT ALL STARTS WITH THE DOMESTICATION OF GRAIN AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE CLASS SYSTEM
Okay kids buckle in you asked for it.
White bread, for a very long time, was something that only the wealthy could enjoy regularly since white flour takes considerably more time and effort to produce than whole grain flour. You have to grind it extra fine, sift it, ect. Therefore, it has historically been more expensive, and still should be because it takes more steps to produce.
HOWEVER, since it was something that was harder to produce, serving white bread was a ‘special occasions’ sort of thing, which led to ‘rich people showing off how rich they were by serving it regularly’. Poorer people, meanwhile, got their regular whole wheat flour, which incidentally is better for you but we didn’t know that at the time.
(Also, whole wheat tastes better, white bread is just bland. Whole wheat bread tastes sort of nutty and delicious.)
So for the vast majority of time this was how things were. Until modern industrialization made producing white flour on a large scale easier, and all of a sudden you had white bread that ordinary folk could afford!!! So of course it is hugely popular immediately amongst the middle and lower classes. Enter the age of Wonder Bread, where you can buy your bread pre-made and sliced!!! White bread with no labor from you, cheap enough for ordinary folk to afford!
So of course, when everyone can have white bread, the upper classes now have to find a way to be Better again. This dovetailed nicely with the discovery that, hang on, whole grains are better for us than bleached white flour, and the rising craze among the upper classes for fitness (Because being soft and plump is no longer something that only the rich can achieve, so of course now being slim and toned is more desirable)
Enter the rise of the popularity of whole wheat sprouted grain artisanal bread for $10 a fuckin loaf, and the fact that if you want to buy 5 pounds of whole wheat flour, that logically should be cheaper as it still takes less effort to produce, you’re going to have to pay about a dollar or two more than if you buy the same amount of bleached white flour.
And don’t give me shit about supply and demand, because whole wheat and white flour are made from the same exact thing, but one just has more steps involved in production. You’d think companies would be thrilled about this, but nah, they know that upper class people feel More Important Than The Peasants when they pay extra for their whole wheat flour so here I am, a humble middle class drone who wants to make her own whole wheat bread because it is tastier and better for you, paying $5.17 a bag for whole wheat flour when white flour is $3.48
It’s classist bullshit.
In Victorian era (do I love some silly Victorians, ha), the fashion for white bread and its more or less general availability came with an interesting side effect: with their… love for substitutes, bakers pretty much had no choice but to replace flour with substances with no nutritional value if not harmful. It was easier on the health of the richer, as their diet had more variety, but very harmful for the people for whom bread was the main source of calories.
Yep. The number of bakers cutting their white flour with plaster dust, chalk, alum, or similar was absolutely stunning.
It led, eventually, to the establishment of trading standards legislation and the appointment of inspectors who could sample and test food products like flour and level heavy punishment on people selling products not up to standard.
The British Sale of Food and Drugs act was the ancestor of the United States’ modern FDA.
Haven’t bread sigils been a thing since Roman times or something, to prevent bread from being cut with bad shit, or from bad flour being used?
Yep the romans had laws about it, but that whole legal system kinda crumbled with the empire.
You and I can never go grocery shopping. It’d turn into an episode of Good Eats meets Adam Ruins Everything but with us.
This just makes me want to go to a Whole Foods store with you TBH
I want to watch and munch popcorn.
Episode 2 is me finding the spice aisle and going on a three hour rant about the total discrepancy between the prices paid to the producers of spices and the prices paid by the end consumer, because it isn’t 1640 anymore we can ship a lobster from Maine to Tokyo in half a day there is no reason my spice merchants should be paying the Badanese women who own the trees and actually produce the spice a few dollars a pound and then turning around and charging me an arm and a pint of blood for a handful of whole nutmegs.
(Also footnote to the flour discussion: since white flour removes more of the grain, it takes more grains of wheat to produce the same volume/weight than it does to produce wholemeal/wholewheat flour. Which is another reason why wholemeal should be cheaper.)
Tonight at Walmart I saw a little boy ask a little girl if he could hug her because he liked her sweater. The girl (these kids looked to be about 5, MAYBE 6) said no, so the boy said “okay. I like your sweater. Bye.” And then ran back to his parents.
He said to his Dad “I didn’t hug her because she said no, but I told her I liked her sweater!” And his dad said “Cool buddy!” And they went on with their shopping trip.
If a small child understands the ‘complex’ concept of consent, and the meaning of the word ‘no’, then so should everyone else.
so in 2010 i made a facebook event for my birthday party for this year, because i thought “haha wouldnt that be funny, 2018 is forever away!”. but now it is 2018, and my birthday is in 2 days.
people have been building the hype for the past 8 years
and now im stressed cause i gotta deliver, i had 8 years to make plans and i procrastinated to the last minute. time makes fools of us all
Iron in the Sand 