Category: Commentary

What I think about stuff…

Posted on

My Last Day in Sydney

In this post, I talked about my last night in Sydney on a trip I took there in 1989. As I wrote the piece, I just kept writing and writing and writing, going past the last night of my trip and well into the next day. So I decided to break the article in two. Enjoy!

I woke up the next morning some time just after 9:00 am, nary the worse for wear, despite my truly heroic intake of alcohol the night before and the scant four and a half hours of sleep I’d gotten (oh, to be 17 again!). I quickly showered and dressed, and mom told me to go down to the hotel restaurant and get something to eat while she got ready.

At the time, the hotel was known as the Sheraton Wentworth (it’s now the Sofitel Sydney Wentworth). I seem to recall some sort of breakfast buffet thing going on at the edge of the main lobby. It was jam-packed with folks, and while I didn’t feel hungover or anything, it all just seemed like a bit too much at the moment. I turned around to look for some stairs to the street and spied another restaurant in the hotel. Although empty of customers, there were wait staff milling about inside.

I walked over and asked someone if they were open. The man looked at me as if he was going to say no, but instead kind of shrugged his shoulders and told me to come on in. I was seated at a table and presented a menu, I chose the “Aussie Burger” because it had a fried egg on it… and eggs are for breakfast, right?

As I sat waiting for my food in this large, empty restaurant, I suddenly became aware of the elevator music coming through the speakers in the ceiling. If you’re under the age of 35 you might not have any idea of what “elevator music” was. Of course, today Muzak offers a wide variety of music to fit almost any location you can think of, from 80s to country to hip-hop to dance music. But back in the 70s and 80s, “Muzak” exclusively meant orchestras or jazz bands doing covers of contemporary hits. And for some damn reason, it always seemed like they had a flute doing the melody line. Remember the “jazz flute” scene from Anchorman?

Yeah, imagine that… only they’re playing “Call Me Maybe” or “We Are Young”… and they’re serious about it.

So a few minutes passed, and the waiter brought my burger. I picked off the slice of pickled beet (I don’t get it, either) and added the required mustard. I assembled the burger, and picked it up and brought it to my mouth. But just as I went to take a bite… I noticed the music that was playing… it was so familiar… what WAS that song? And then it hit me: it was the elevator music version of “Welcome to the Jungle”:

I damn near peed him pants from laughing so hard. Unless they too heard the song, the wait staff were no doubt wondering why the “crazy Seppo” was laughing so hard by himself.

Anyway, I ate the burger, and it was good. I went back upstairs, where mom was almost ready to leave. I quickly packed my bag and organized a couple of bags of souvenirs while mom packed her own things. A little while later, around 11:00 am I’d guess, we were packed and ready.

Continue reading “My Last Day in Sydney”

Posted on

My Last Night in Sydney

So… back in 1989 I went to Australia. Although it was only 25 years ago, foreign travel was way more exotic then than it is now, especially to somewhere like Australia. Hell, at the time just getting a passport was a big deal. There wasn’t an Internet you could easily download the necessary forms from, there were no digital cameras so you had to go to a photographer or a camera store to get the passport photos made, and there were only like, two places in all of Atlanta where you could process a passport: the federal courthouse downtown and the Decatur post office.

So yeah, it was a big deal. And the best part of my trip was that it was free. My father was a wholesale grocer, and every year one of his vendors offered free trips if you moved enough of their product. And the trips were tiered, too. I don’t know the exact numbers, but let’s say that if you sold 100 cases of their products in a calendar year you got a free 5-day Caribbean cruise. If you sold 300 cases you got a free 7-day trip to Paris. But if you sold 600 cases, you got the top-tier prize, which was something big… like 14 days in Australia. The funny thing was, the year before my dad actually sold enough so that four people could go on the trip… which would have been perfect for my four-member nuclear family. But for some reason I was worried about school and didn’t want to take two weeks off. Hard to believe, I know!

Dad didn’t sell as much product in 1988, so that year, when the vendor offered a similar trip to Australia, only two people could go. And this time I really wanted to go. And since I was a senior in high school who only had two classes that really mattered, missing class wouldn’t be too much of a problem this time around. So it was decided that my mom and I would go.

I won’t go into detail about most of the trip. After all, the name of this article is “My Last Night in Sydney”, right? It suffices to say that I had a lot of fun: snorkeling and taking a glass bottom boat on the Great Barrier Reef, enjoying a rowdy dinner at a hotel deep in the “bush”, visiting a koala preserve, another dinner at a sheep shearing ranch, looking for pretty girls with hot accents… you know, all the usual stuff a 17 year-old kid would get into. But here’s the thing: it was a group trip. We were traveling with 70 or so other wholesalers who’d also sold enough merchandise to make the trip. I’m not normally a fan of escorted trips, but this one was pretty awesome: we stayed at some of the fanciest hotels I’ve ever been in, hardly touched our suitcases the entire trip, and had most everything lined up for us. Want to go to a koala preserve? No problem – just be in the hotel lobby at 11:00 am!

Continue reading “My Last Night in Sydney”

Posted on

Foods They Need to Bring Back

Hi Everyone! It’s that time again… time for me to sit in my office chair and assume my Andy Rooney persona. I’m only 41 years old, but I’m gonna be all like “why do kids today like Taylor Swift so much?” and “remember when Cops was the only reality show on TV?”. But in today’s episode I’m going to talk about… food. Read the following, but try to use Andy Rooney’s voice in your head when you do so:

BIG JOHN’S BEANS

Big John's Beans

I don’t much care for baked beans. It’s not that I don’t like the taste – they taste just fine. It’s just that I’ve had them a million times. Every cook-out you go to, every family get-together you’re forced to suffer through, every barbecue place – from Valdosta, Georgia, north to Richmond, Virginia and west to San Antonio – has baked beans. And yes, Big John’s beans were still baked beans… but with a delicious twist. You see the picture? Big John’s Beans actually came in two cans: one large can with the beans, and another, smaller can taped to the other which had the “fixin’s”. You opened both cans, dumped the beans into a pot, then added the fixin’s. You’d stir well and heat ’em through. They were so tasty, those beans. Gosh, I wish ConAgra hadn’t discontinued these a few years ago. Bush’s Grillin’ Beans aren’t nearly the same thing. Not at all. THERE, INTERNET.. I SAID IT! Thankfully, Big John’s has something of a cult following on the Internet, and there are tons of “copy cat” recipes out there (here’s one that looks pretty good).

CHOCOLATE VANILLA CREME POP TARTS

Pop Tarts

Oh, I know what you’re thinking… “but they still make Cookies and Cream Pop Tarts! Isn’t that the same thing?” No, they’re not the same. Not at all. In fact, hell no. The Cookies and Cream Pop Tarts are a fine product, no doubt. But they taste like… well, whatever the hell “cookies and cream” flavor actually is. Chocolate Vanilla Pop Tarts were exactly what they said on the tin: chocolate pastry with vanilla filling inside. The pastry part, despite being chocolate, wasn’t all that sweet. It was more of a “cocoa flavor”, which was good, because the preternaturally sweet vanilla was all the sugar you needed. I used to keep a box of these bad boys on hand at all times – one two-pack of these and an ice cold Diet Coke were my go-to breakfast for years. So thanks a hell of a lot for ruining that, Kellogg’s!

IHOP’S POTATO PANCAKES

Potato Pancakes

I think a lot about the duality of man. Light and Dark. Good and Evil. Pleasure and Pain. And I think it all started with IHOP. When I was a young man, I’d go to IHOP and every single time I’d struggle over whether to get chocolate chip pancakes or potato pancakes. Chocolate chip or potato? Chocolate chip or potato? Chocolate chip or potato? I’d deliberate over it as if the fate of the whole world depended on it. Remember the scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Indy has to pick the right chalice? This was worse. Hell, I put more deliberation into one instance of chocolate chip vs. potato pancakes than I did in deciding what university I went to or the last car I bought. Chocolate chip had the sweet, but potato brought the savory. And potato pancakes came with an additional decision: apple sauce or sour cream on the side? Me, I was a traditionalist, going with sour cream. I had some vague notion of European sophistication in doing so, as if people in Austria were making the exact same choice at that exact same moment: “mit Sauerrahm, bitte“. There were a few times when I went down the apple sauce path, but always felt like an old geezer in doing so, like I should ask the waitress to turn the TV to Matlock and tell those damn teenagers at the other table to pipe down, ‘cos I didn’t storm the beach at Normandy so some punk-ass kids could shout over Andy Griffith. So I guess in a way I should be thankful that some damn bean counter at IHOP decided to get rid of the potato pancakes. It’s taken one of life’s most difficult decisions away from me. But dammit, I liked having to make that decision. And I liked having an old school dish like potato pancakes around, instead of the “Tuscan Chicken Griller” or “Spinach, Roasted Red Pepper & Cheese Griddle Melt” or whatever new slightly trendy crap IHOP serves these days. YOU BASTARDS!

Posted on

Two Questions for Google

1) Why are / and \ different keys on the default Android keyboard? You have to press the “?123” key to get to the numbers and symbols keyboard, and / is available there. So you have to press ALT to reveal the \ symbol… but it’s not the same key as / was. And don’t say “That’s how it is on a QWERTY keyboard”, because you altered the ?123 layout anyway.

2) Why, in the name of all that is holy, does Gmail always mark every single newsletter and promotional email that I actually want as “SPAM” and move it to the junk folder… but never marks newsletters and promotional emails I never signed up for as junk, even though I have repeatedly told Gmail I’m not interested in emails from AstraZeneca and Pfizer?

frustration

Posted on

COOL SITE: Filleritem.com

As you probably know, Amazon offers free “Super Saver Shipping” on most purchases of $25 or more. But what do you do when the item you want is, say, $21.95? Do you bite the bullet and pay $4.95 for regular shipping? Or do you look for a $3.05 item to get you to $25?

If you’re the latter type of person, you might want to check out filleritem.com. It’s easy: just figure out how much you need to get to $25. Heck, if you’re bad at math, your Amazon shopping cart will helpfully tell you how much you need:

amazon_2

Then go to filleritem and enter that amount:

amazon

The site will then give you a list of items around that price. The results page will be plain HTML, with popular items listed in bold face and really popular items in boldface with a thumbnail of the product. Just click any link to go to the Amazon page in question, then add it to your cart and get your free shipping!

I’ve known about filleritem.com for a couple of years now, but only used it for the first time last week. I have a beach trip coming up somewhat soon, and both of my pairs of flip-flops are on their way out. I’ve long heard that Havaianas sandals are the best in the world, so I went to Amazon to see what they had. I found a pair I liked, but they were $21.27. Shipping was $4.98, for a grand total of $26.25.

I went over to filleritem and looked for a $3.73 item to add to my cart. It was kind of fun looking at all the random stuff you can buy at Amazon for $3.73: really awful CDs and DVDs, odd spare parts for aquariums, and weird bits and bobs from the hardware department. It took around 15 minutes and a couple of searches, but I ended up ordering an 8″ micro USB cable. I have one of those external “battery pack” chargers that I mostly use for my phone. The regular 36″ USB cable that came with the phone is a bit much to carry around… but the 2″ cable included with the charger is too short, and includes various (easily lost) adapter tips for multiple devices. The 8″ cable seems like a nice compromise. It was only $3.95, making my total for the order $25.22, a savings of $1.76 over buying just the sandals with standard shipping. It’s not the “Deal of the Century” by any means, but I saved almost $2 and got a USB cable out of it, versus paying $2 more for… well, nothing, really.

The only downside to filleritem is that if you’re in a hurry, it’s not the site for you. The results page(s) give you the name of the item only, with no context. If you can figure out what Sue Devitt Silky Sheen E/S – Prague or Fart Bombs are just from their names, good for you. But if not you’re going to have to click the link to figure out what the item is. And some items – like Dorman HELP! 85568 T-Tap 16-14 – have no additional information on Amazon’s site, either. I went to the page but still have NO IDEA what a “Dorman HELP! 85568 T-Tap 16-14” is! Do you?

Posted on

DUMB RANT: Cashiers

I am a cash-only person. There are two reasons for this, which I’d rather not get in to right now. I’ll use a credit or debit card when dining out sometimes, especially if the check hasn’t been divided in advance – it’s much easier to just hand the waitress a Visa and say “put the burger, turkey sandwich, the Bass Ales and Shock Tops on my tab, everything else is on [the other couple’s tab]”. But if I’m buying something in a store, a fast food place, or a bar, 99.999999% of the time I’ll use cash.

So… the missus and I were on vacation recently, and twice a cashier accidentally “hit the exact change button”, meaning that the register didn’t tell her how much change to give me. In both cases, the cashiers panicked and looked furiously for a calculator. The first time it was a young white female, and she had a calculator handy, so it didn’t take her long to figure it out. But the second time the cashier spent a full two minutes looking through every drawer at the checkout stand for a calculator. She even called over to another cashier for help in finding a calculator! I was so tempted to say something, but since she was a young black female, I didn’t want to be the “old white man telling her how to do her job”. So I waited, almost amused by the whole thing.

I don’t know what’s worse… the fact that employers don’t train cashiers worth a damn these days, or the fact that neither of those two young women could figure out on their own the age-old practice of counting up change.

See ladies, it works like this: at one store, my total was $13.42, and I handed the cashier a $20 bill. All you have to do to make change is count up from the total to the amount of money the customer hands you. So you’d take my total ($13.42) and put three pennies in your hand (to make it $13.45). You’d then put a nickel in your hand (to make it $13.50), then put two quarters in your hand (to make it $14.00). You’d then put a dollar bill in your hand (to make it $15), then put a $5 bill in your hand (to make it $20). You’d then have $6.58 in your hand which, if you want to figure it out on a calculator, is the correct amount of change for that transaction. No calculator is needed… at all. Trust me: it works. Millions of your cashier ancestors used that method for decades before registers even showed you how much change to give the customer!

And while I’m on the subject, a few times in the recent past I’ve gotten the stink eye from cashiers for giving them “odd amounts” of money. You know the drill: Maybe your total is $5.52, and you give the cashier $11.02 so you can get $5.50 back in nice, even bills and coins. It’s like they’re paralyzed with fear and confusion. But fear not… the same system works here, too! Just subtract the 2¢ I gave you… put two quarters in your hand (to make $6) and then put a $5 in your hand to make $11. See? Was that so hard?

Am I alone here? Is it just me? I might be a little different because my father owned a wholesale grocery store and he often worked the register there. So as a kid I had a lot of toy cash registers and grocery store playsets. My dad taught me early on how to count money. I could be exaggerating, but I could swear I knew how to count up from the time I was 4 or 5 years old… and here are these teenage girls apparently unaware of even the concept of such a thing. Am I the lone voice in the wilderness here, or are teen cashiers even stupider today than they were 20 years ago?

Posted on

Goodbye Old Friend

I first met my girlfriend, the love of my life, back in 1995. But we didn’t start dating until 2002. She lived outside of Charlotte, and I lived outside of Atlanta. We eventually decided to move in together, and since she had a mortgage and my lease was almost up, it only made sense for me to move in with her.

One of the first people I met after I moved to Charlotte was my neighbor. Let’s call him Tom. Tom was in his late 50s, with a head full of white hair and a little beer belly. He almost looked like Santa Claus minus the beard.

Tom and his wife had lived in our townhouse complex since the late 1980s, and Tom knew every little eccentricity the builders indulged themselves when building our townhomes. So I often asked him for advice with home improvement projects, or borrowed some tools from him, since he was the kind of guy who always had the 9/32″ drill bit or handful of #10 deck screws you needed to finish a job. Tom even came over and helped when we had a couple of minor emergencies, like when the upstairs toilet sprung a leak or when the pipe leading out of our hot water heater cracked, spewing water all over the crawlspace. I also remember stopping by his house one time to ask if he knew a good local place to get my kitchen knives sharpened; Tom told me to save my money and did it himself instead, and did a great job.

Because our complex has a huge common back yard, Tom received a fair amount of money from the homeowner’s association each month for cutting the grass. The yard is so big that it would often take him two or three days to cut it all. And since I work from home most days, it drove me insane to hear that lawnmower running all the damn time as I tried to concentrate on creating a batch file, or troubleshooting a wacky IIS server, or figuring out why desktop clients weren’t resolving DNS names correctly.

Continue reading “Goodbye Old Friend”

Posted on

Aldi and Trader Joe’s

In the United States, you often hear people say that Aldi and Trader Joe’s are the “same company”, or that they’re “sister companies”. This isn’t entirely accurate. You’d be better off calling them “cousin companies”.

Aldi was founded in Germany in 1961 by two brothers, Karl and Theo Albrecht. Their father, a miner, developed emphysema from his work. So their mother opened a small shop in a suburb of Essen to provide for the family. Theo apprenticed there while Karl worked at a nearby delicatessen. In 1946, the brothers took over the shop – then called Albrecht’s – from their mother, and soon turned it into a small chain. The brothers’ “no frills, just dirt-cheap prices” philosophy was incredibly popular in post-war West Germany, and by 1960 the chain had grown to 300 stores.

But then the two brothers came to blows… over cigarettes. Theo wanted to sell cigarettes at Aldi stores, but Karl did not, because he thought cigarettes would attract shoplifters. The brothers decided to split the company – by then named Aldi for “Albrecht Discount” – into two companies: ALDI Nord (Aldi North) and ALDI Süd (Aldi South). Aldi North, run by Theo, operates all the stores in northern Germany, almost all of the former East Germany, as well as the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, France, Spain, Denmark and Portugal. Aldi South, run by Karl, operates all the stores in southern Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Slovenia, Hungary, Poland, Ireland, Australia, the UK and the US. So if you’re shopping at Aldi in the US, you’re giving your money to Aldi South.

Aldi has over 9,000 stores worldwide. In 2009 the two companies’ combined annual revenue was €53 billion ($65.63 billion USD). So it’s no surprise that the Albrecht brothers became insanely rich. Karl is worth around $25.5 billion, and is the richest man in Germany. Theo was the second richest man in Germany until his death in 2010. So naturally the brothers were always looking for places to invest their money.

Trader Joe’s started as “Pronto Market” in the Los Angeles area in 1958*. It was a small chain of grocery\convenience stores, kind of like an upscale 7-Eleven. But when the real 7-Eleven chain came to town in the early 1960s, Pronto founder Joe Coloumbe became worried that they’d run him out of business. While on vacation in the Caribbean, Joe noticed American tourists buying what were then “exotic” foods and spices to take home, like jerk seasoning and West Indian rum. With “Tiki Culture” still popular in the US, Coloumbe thought he could make an exotic food specialty store work. He opened the first Trader Joe’s in 1967 on Arroyo Parkway in Pasadena, California. The shop developed a cult following, and soon there were Trader Joe’s stores throughout southern California.

NERD ALERT: Don Draper shopped at a Pronto Market in the Mad Men episode “The Good News”, recapped here)

Theo Albrecht – who, you will remember, owned Aldi North, which does not run the Aldi stores in the US – bought the Trader Joe’s chain as a personal investment in 1979. So Aldi and Trader Joe’s aren’t related to each other legally. Of course, Theo’s business philosophy of buying in bulk and selling private brands over name brands has taken over at Trader Joe’s, so there are a lot of similarities between the two businesses.

UPDATE: This article was written in 2012. Karl Albrecht died in 2014. The Albrecht family inherited the company from their respective fathers. Since Karl’s death there have been several proposed plans to combine ALDI Nord and ALDI Süd into one gigantic company. As far as I know, none are have been approved. The family seems certain, however, that one day the company will be merged.

I feel I should also mention that Trader Joe’s is now officially part of Aldi Nord. As Wikipedia says,

In 1979, owner and CEO of Aldi Nord Theo Albrecht bought the company as a personal investment for his family.

At some point shortly before or after Theo’s death, Trader Joe’s was sold to Aldi Nord and is  now part of its official corporate structure.

Here’s one last thing you might not know: Theo Albrecht was kidnapped in 1971. His family paid 7 million Deutschmark (around $2 million in 1971, or $15.1 million in 2023 dollars). Albrecht tried to claim the ransom as a business expense (i.e. a tax deduction) but lost his case.

The Albrecht family (Theo’s side especially) are very reclusive. The family released a photo of Theo in 1971 for the newspapers the day after the kidnapping; the only known photo of Theo taken after that was with his brother in 1987. The family was said to own an island in the North Sea with a private golf course. To this day, most of the Albrechts eschew the public eye.

 

 

Posted on

Using Multiple Payment Methods Online

One advantage brick & mortar stores have over their online counterparts is that most are happy to split payment methods for you. Say you want to buy a new TV, but you want to use three $50 Visa gift cards and pay the rest in cash. Walmart and Best Buy would have no problem doing this, but it’s impossible to do on Walmart.com or BestBuy.com. Online, it’s either this Visa or that MasterCard, not this Visa and this MasterCard.

Although Amazon doesn’t offer a way to use multiple payment methods directly, there is an easy workaround: just use gift cards (or regular credit cards) to buy Amazon gift cards for yourself! If you order them online, you can have Amazon send them to you via email, so you can easily apply them to your own account. Using my TV example, you could convert the three $50 gift cards into three $50 Amazon gift codes, which would total $150 in Amazon credit. You could buy the TV using your gift balance and charge the difference to another card.

There are a couple of other reasons why you might want to convert a gift card to an Amazon gift card.

For one, your Amazon gift balance never has any fees and never expires. Although most Visa, MasterCard and American Express gift cards no longer have expiration dates or “dormancy fees” for not using them after a time, some still do. Plus, you can always lose or misplace a plastic gift card. If you’re a big Amazon shopper, convert a Visa gift card to Amazon credit immediately to ensure that you get the full value of the card.

Secondly, Amazon gift cards can be ordered in almost any amount. If you have several “leftover” gift cards with balances of $2.13 or $3.27, why not convert them to Amazon credit and get rid of the near-useless gift cards? Yes, you’ll have to process each card individually, but even $5 can buy you an MP3 album on Amazon, so why waste the money?