Oh. woo. Got it.
See here for a lengthy explanation from a Krishna. In part,
Reminds me of the Harry Enfield “I saw you coming” sketch.
The manager is a grade A jackass.
Do small groceries have a high infant mortality rate, or is that more a property of small restaurants? (Or am I off in the weeds and it’s a property of all small businesses, regardless of what they’re selling?)
Regardless of this wintry economic climate, being a jerk only sells if you can be a jerk like Steve Jobs or A-Rod. Orson Welles couldn’t manage to get his own way all the time, and if you don’ t know who he was you’re the asshole; why should any grocer expect success?
If someone can show me a big difference between eight dollar eggs and two dollar eggs (I assume that’s a dozen price), I’ll consider them.
Do 8 dollar eggs come from different chickens?
Dumb retailer loses his store, we’ve seen it before. I’m hijacking this joint.
Oh, so twenty-somethings don’t deserve to make a living?
I have tried to set several unemployed friends up with little micro businesses to get them some income. One is making a little cash at it, one crashed and burned and blames me for my poor advice.
Of course this is the same person who rarely answered the phone and insisted “people should leave messages and she will call them back” or would comment how unfair it was that they did not want to pay extra because the job site was like 7 miles away not 3. Even though we factored the maximum travel distance into her base charge.
They were free-range eggs or something. Of course, what they don’t tell you is that free-range generally means the chickens do get to roam, but they also eat a bunch of crap (often literally) and are usually less healthy anyway. And even at that, 8$ a dozen eggs are still overpriced!
“Free range” doesn’t have a strong standard of identity for commercial labeling. But real free range chickens (with daily access to a real outdoor area, with grass and bugs and sunshine and everything) do produce the best eggs and the best meat. It’s a difference you can see from the color of the yolks and the meat.
Also, such birds generally live their lives without any antibiotics; that’s a good thing, a more healthy bird. They do get standard immunizations.
Where I am, where people often keep hens, those eggs are $2/dozen. In cities they might be twice that or more, but I can’t see how they could possibly be $8.
Of course they do, but I am really curious as to what their business plan was:
- Carry over priced items.
- Don’t carry items people want.
- Expect lots of repeat business.
- ???
- Profit!
I don’t know about that. The color of the yolks are dependent on the diet of the chicken. I used to keep chickens and their yolks were bright orange because of the particular feed we used. As for the meat, I have no information, since I never ate one of our chickens.
If you have a lot of chickens you might need antibiotics sometimes, otherwise some disease can destroy your entire crop. It’s my understanding that using them is a matter of scale.
I’m not defending $8 eggs, but some dude with a country house who has a few hens can get away with charging $2 for a dozen eggs, because it isn’t a real business, it’s an extra that comes from some pets. I assume actually having a real egg farm with a few hundred hens and having distribution and labor costs do deal with would increase the cost significantly.
As a Central Iowan myself, fd, I strongly suspect our natural get-along-go-along conformity would have eliminated any Central Iowan with half a lick of business sense from ever trying something as culturally audacious as a gourmet market. Anyone with sense and audacity ends up in foreign places like Iowa City or Minneapolis as soon as they figure out the way of things. It takes a clueless screwup to try it in Des Moines.
So by “disturbing meditation” what they really mean is that onions induce flatulence, causing outbreaks of laughter amongst the not-yet utterly brainwashed faithful?
There is no f-ing way eggs cost $8/doz in the Union Square Greenmarket in NYC, and NYC has both a higher cost of living and higher average wages than in Boston. You can get happy chicken eggs there – organic eggs from free-range hens that have been petted, told they are pretty, and had Chaucer read to them by moonlight – they don’t cost EIGHT freaking dollars. I think the highest I’ve seen is $4/doz. Most of those eggs come a considerable distance to market as well, between 2 and 6 hours drive.
Do they drive themselves?
They’re clever that way.
No doubt about that – my brother has a couple dozen chickens that spend their days roaming about his yard. The difference between the eggs I get from his place vs. the ones from the supermarket? Night and day. Nothing like an omelet made from eggs that had been inside a chicken a half-hour before.
However, no matter how tasty they are, they sure as hell ain’t worth eight bucks a dozen.
Eh, I don’t totally buy this. I just don’t think the boutique model works here; not enough stupid people with huge amounts of disposable income, and status symbols just aren’t measured that way in these parts. There are foodies here, though. Gateway Market on Ingersoll seems to be making it.
Of course they deserve to make a living. They just can’t reasonably expect to make money hand over fist at a customer-oriented business while refusing to cater to customers’ wants.
Id say that nobody deserves to make a living, at least not however they want. I don’t anyone starving, of course, but the world doesn’t owe anybody the acreer of their choice.