When I was about twelve and alone in the house I dumped an ice cube tray into the container inside the freezer, dutifully refilled the tray, and as you say, carried it from the sink with intense concentration and succeeded in depositing it into the freezer – then brushed my damp finger against the metal side of the compartment making it instantly freeze there.
Being an Arizona kid, I’d never licked a flagpole but I instantly pitied those who had. There I was with my hand stick in the freezer with no one to help. I alternated between pulling as gently as I could with breathing warm breath on it and after a good two or three minutes – it seemed longer – got it pulled off.
I elbowed the freezer door shut and I hustled back to the sink, looking in horror at this lump of ice on my index finger. A couple minutes of warm water over it resolved the situation luckily with no wound in the finger – I’d broken the bond between ice and metal, not ice and flesh.
I have driven all over the country to include getting well off the interstates. Where are you seeing gas at smaller stores that are 60-80 cents higher than the chains? I see them maybe 5-10 cents higher but never what you mention.
Okay, sorry your experience is different from mine. And I’m not helping doxxers by posting the name of the small town I live in.
Heck, we have two Taco Bell locations owned by the same franchisee, less than five miles apart, both in suburban locations. One has the #1 combo at $8.19 the other $6.79. Neither is at an airport, highway rest stop, or other “concession” location. Just on a public road.
The difference?
One is in a town that’s super hostile to chain restaurants, it’s only chain competition for miles around is Dunkin or Starbucks (Somehow the snobs’ hostility to fast food chains does not extend to coffee places, and is somewhat attenuated for CVS/Walgreens).
The other is in a town that welcomes commercial development of all kinds on the “bad side” of the town. There is a strip of state highway chock-a-block with fast food, oil change and convenience store chains. Also car dealerships, chain drug and two chain supermarkets less than a mile apart. The town loves the commercial real estate tax revenue. Keeps the property taxes on the 2 acre minimum “estates” on the other side of town a bit lower.
Both towns have among the best schools in the state. Top 10% consistently. Top 5% if you exclude “exam schools”, STEM Charters and other selective admission schools. The demographics served by these two Taco Bell’s are not that different. The competition they face is.
By the way, I just went through an intersection with 7-11 selling Regular at 4.49 and Mobil across the street at $4.99. Not across town, across the street.
My guess: The one in the snobby town hostile to chains is more expensive, because they have fewer customers. And the one in the “bad” side of town is cheaper because their incomes are lower.
Or did I just reveal my unknown-to-me bigotry about this stuff?
There was a big automated ice machine somewhere near where we lived. This thing was a big metal building, maybe the size of an RV, and it would dispense ice freshly crushed into a heavy paper bag for maybe just something like 25¢ or 50¢. Smaller machines would dispense smaller bags of pre-crushed ice which had always turned back into a solid chunk. Blocks of ice were available some places and there was an ice cream shop that would sell dry ice.
By the way BOTH towns are snobby as hell. Even the one with the strip of chain restaurants/stores on one street, would not permit a McDonalds in the town center. One has the oceanfront area to monetize, the other a piece of state highway.
I bet the one with higher prices has MORE customers, judging by the queues in the drive thru, but who knows? Their service rate could be slower. The one on the busy strip of road has five or six fast food or quick serve places within a few hundred yards.
Yes. Using the 1, 2, or 3 zeros is convenient and reduces mistakes from hitting the zero key multiple times quickly. Those machines were incredible to watch performing divides.
You were lucky. I had a similar experience though in my case it was grabbing something from the freezer compartment with a wet hand that promptly got stuck. The result was something akin to frostbite that required bandages that I had to change daily along with topical medicine for a few weeks. Fortunately, there was no scarring, or any other visible signs left on my hand.
Need to figure out how to go somewhere? Better get your folding map at the filling station. You know, the place that gave us the drinking glasses we use in the kitchen.
And then have fun trying to fold that map back together nice and flat to put back in the glove compartment. It’s not really that hard for some people, seems to be impossible for others. Tough to do for anybody while driving. You see people driving erratically now it might be from texting while driving, back then you might see someone driving erratically while trying to fold a map at the same time.
I’m a GIS professional. Thirty years now. Of course we have GPS in our cars and phones, but when my wife is behind the wheel on a long road trip, I find an atlas interesting to look at.
As a kid, whenever we went on road trips I used to enjoy the AAA TripTiks. They would have interesting information about the areas you were driving through, in addition to the maps.
I had a huge road atlas circa 1975. It was incredibly complete with better detail on a lot of smaller streets than I expected. By the mid-80s it had lost a lot of utility, lots of highway exits had been added and changed along with new access roads and a ton of new construction added smaller streets.
I spent some time in the LA area in the late 80s. To navigate that very large and dense city there were a series of books available for subsections of LA county. Most people didn’t own a whole set, people would trade them around to get the one where they needed to go. Development was happening fast enough at the time the books didn’t stay up to date for long. GPS must have killed the company making those books.
When I moved here to Rhode Island in the late 90s we got a road atlas that was up to date for that year with every single road in the state listed. Yes, it’s a small state, but it has a dense population. And it also has a lot of those thick-headed people living in a small area too. Amazingly in this tiny space a large majority of the population is located in about 1/3 of the state. Development has created a lot of new small roads here since then, but you could still fit all the maps into a small book if anyone bothered to publish one in the face of GPS competition.
When checking out at the grocers, on an attended checkout with a rubber belt, do you use those plastic sticks to show where your order begins and ends?
I remember when they always had cigarette advertising.
They’re still around. A lot of stuff did change, scanners, credit card readers, membership cards, plastic bags, detailed receipts sorted by category and showing how much money you saved (I could have saved $30,000 at the boat show if I bought a fancy party boat), less interesting tabloids (haven’t seen a two headed baby story in ages), cool grocery carts for kids, a strap on the cart handle to hold down a car seat which you had to have to drive the kid to the grocery store until the kid is at least 8 years old.