The cost of vegetables

To begin with I have to state that my mathematical ability is sub-par. I’ve never been able to collaborate with numbers to any degree os satusfaction. That out of the way I should discuss my experience today shopping and my shock at, as the title of this peice hits, the cost of vegetables.

I tend to shop at Greens Food Fayre in Lisburn. Have done for years. We have a Tesco but they don’t often sell what I want and seem to have no intention of starting. Greens satisfied me for a few years but lately have begun to slide in the quality of both service and produce. Often I’m finding myself leaving if no empty handed but with only half of the items I went in for. I don’t think I’m a lazy bugger and most days I can fill these needs elsewhere. I refuse to substitute in the same store. If they don’t have green peppers I’m not going to buy yellow. I’ll go elsewhere for green peppers because, godammit, I want green bloody peppers.

Today while shopping for a few items such as Bacos & WD40 (of which they had neither) I noticed they had taken heed of complaints by myself and others and started stocking another brand of Tofu. My experiments with tofu have been dissapoiting to say the least. Quite a few people have reccomended Tofu to me but generally the only tofu I’ve been able to find here is Blue Dragon. Blue Dragon are one of the most popular and better selling brands of Oriental cooking ingredients. This is largely down to the fact that it’s all most places stock. Blue Dragon is commonly seen as fairly poor. Their tofu for instance I have discovered through research is unusable and derided by those that cook with Tofu. Couldron Organic tofu is what has been reccoemnded and for once is what I have found. Funnily enough pricewise it’s approximately the same as Blue Dragon. It remains to be seen as to where my experiments with this brand produce anything remotely edible.

Anyway I decided on A thai red curry and set about buying the ingredients. Simple ingredients. I cheated and purchased a bag of the Amoy Stir-Fry Vegitables rather than their cans of stir-fry vegitables which are usually cheaper but tainted by the briney water they are immersed in. I also purchased a red pepper (for a red curry, decided on uniformity rather than contrast), an onion, a half cucumber and a bag of cashews. I may have had anonion at home but i couldn’t remember and didn’t want to take the risk being too tired to go out again if I didn’t. Plus onions are cheap so fuck it.

I assumed that this little lot wouldn’t stretch beyond the £10 I knew was all I really had on me. As I stated at the beginning my maths are fairly woeful but i can make a guess at a total and be reasonably close usually. I’m never too confident about it though and tend to err on the side of caution. I assumed it would be approx £8 or so, factoring in the bottle of groundnut oil and my applejuice and chinese chicken Tayto crisps I’d picked up as a snack while avoiding the pesty Oxfam goons that litter the town harrasing passers-by on a daily basis (this is a whole other rant I won’t go into now).

The total came to almost £12. I had to use my credit card. Being a unconfident soul I assumed I had grossly miscalculated my total and was suffering the embarrasment of having to use credit like a shameful pathetic poor person.

I left to get other bits and peices mentally berating myself for being such an idiot. I headed home after a trip to the ATM to collect more money to buy WD40 before rememebering i still had the tenner I’d failed to be able to use in Greens. On the way I decided to consult my recepit as this overspend had been burning in my consciousness and I discovered the problem was that I had made a wrong assumption about the price of some of the goods I’d picked up (it ALWAYS pays to look at the price on the shelf to make sure something hasn’t increased in cost since you last shopped).

Everything looked approx ok until I was this one entry:

FRUIT & VEG 3.35

Hmmm. What the hell did I buy that cost 3.35? Fruit and veg? What damn vegetable costs this? I’m a confused distracted type generally and it’s always possible I’m missing the obvious. So i took my shopping home to look at it and check it all against my receipt to see what exactly this horrendously expensive item was.

After checking and rechecking I discovered it was this:

Half a cucumber. Half a cucumber costs £3.35 in Greens Food Fayre in Lisburn. Has there been a blight of the cucumber harvest that has driven the price through the roof? Is this some kind of special cucumber delicacy that i bought by mistake thinking it was an normal cucumber for ordinary people? Or is it possible that the woman at the till was unable to correctly process the one measly hand-price item I had picked without fucking it up because they are so used to the simple task of shoving a barcode over a reader and shoving something in a bag?

The moral of the story? Shop at Tesco. Yeah they abuse their suppliers and will one day monopolise the food market and force us to buy what they want us to buy and for the price they decide we should pay but let’s face it, the competition are shite.

Tomorrow I’ll probably pop into Greens and quiz someone about this but I’m not hopefully about getting any satisfactory response. They usually say to check your receipt before leaving the shop. Sadly with my social anxiety I’m usually in too much of a rush to get out and prefer to shove it in my pocket with my equally unexamined change and hotfoot it back to fresh air.

So my option here is just quit shopping at Greens regularly. This amazingly expensive cucumber ontop of the poor quality service from the miserable staff and poor stock mean that there is little benefit from shopping there anymore. I think the best way to punish poor service is to withdraw patronisation.

Something to say?