Oh Boy, Santa Brought Me Pringles and Snack Pak Pudding

I swear I'm not making this up.

I had to do an errand in Lincoln this evening so we stopped for dinner the the Superior and 27th Hy-Vee grocery.

By the front entrance they had tables set up with beautifully wrapped food baskets and a sign that the store is your "Holiday Headquarters" or something to that effect. I glanced down at a large basket with cellophane wrap and gleaming bow to see it contained potato chips, Tootsie Rolls, and some microwave popcorn.

"No shit" I thought, "This has to be an employee's idea of a joke."

I looked at some of the other baskets and quickly realised it was not a joke. They weren't even good snack foods (you know, like some beef jerky and Poppycock) but crap you wouldn't eat if it were in your emergency kit and a nuclear bomb had just detonated.

Just imagine the smiles on their faces Christmas morning when they see those small tins of pudding and microwave popcorn!

You might think these baskets were cheap, but the ones I saw were around thirty bucks, which is kind of expensive for Pringles and Snack Pak Pudding. For that kind of money I'd want a Hostess pie or two.

So let me save you thirty bucks by suggesting you go buy a basket at Goodwill for a buck and fill it with junk food from Big Lots, or Aldi. If you go to Aldi you can even get decent chocolate and an interesting assortment of potted meats. If you're really generous it might cost ten bucks. If you're hell-bent on buying it at Hy-Vee you could buy dried fruit and nuts in the produce department and put it in a gift bag for less money than the potato chips and pudding and you won't look like a jackass presenting someone with a "food" basket filled with something you'd only eat at three in the morning on your way back from a concert in 1980 when the Jack-in-the-Box has just closed for the night and the only thing you can find to eat at the gas station are those packages of two oatmeal cookies sandwiched with some sort of "creme" and a bottle of Fresca...then, you might be happy to see a basket of "treats" like those and depending how much of a contact high you got at the concert, you might pay thirty bucks for it. Otherwise, I've got to think, as a consumer you can probably do better.


(For you English majors out there, that was a good example of a run-on sentence).