Janice Williams Loves Austin

I heard on a talk show this week about a new kind of grocery store that only stocks the items that people most need at a grocery and they don’t have a wide variety. Supposedly, 15% of the things in a grocery store bring in 90% of the grocery’s income. The new kind of store moving in is a small, drugstore-sized store that has milk, eggs, bread, etc., but not lots of different kinds. I like that idea, in theory. But I want my Health Nut bread, not just any whole wheat bread, and I do like my Cheerios.

Mark likes his Speed Stick deodorant unscented. That unscented if VERY important to him. Today I was at a little gig-let he had with the Jo’s Coffee House Band on South Congress. I told him I was stopping by a store on the way home. He said he needed deodorant. I was going for butter, so I knew any grocery would have that. I stopped at what I call the “Mexican” grocery because Spanish is the predominant language there and they have the biggest abundance of unusual vegetables that I assume go into Mexican foods I don’t know how to make. I wish I did. I like this store because it is very small and never crowded and I can get in and out in a hurry. I didn’t know if they would have the right variety of deodorant or not. They did not. But they had butter and lard (yes, I buy lard), so I got those and went on down the street to Walgreen’s.

Walgreen’s has a wide variety in the deodorant department, I discovered, but no Speed Stick unscented. There is “Fresh” and “Original” and others, but no unscented. So I decide Mark is just going to have to take what I get him this time, but I will find an unscented deodorant, just of another brand. I looked over this HUGE selection and discovered only one brand that had unscented. The others had “scents” or at least names that can’t possibly mean something to someone buying them. I can only imagine the meeting where the marketing team came up with “scents” called Phoenix or Swagger. True names, I swear.