Wednesday 6 September 2006

Pic of the day: It is a litte known fact that if you give bread to girls from outer space, they will focus singlemindedly on it until it is consumed, and in the meantime you can do pretty much what you will with them, at least if what you will is hide them in the closet so they won't be discovered by the landlord's daughter. I did not know this until I saw the anime DearS a couple years ago. And that's not the only thing I did not know about bread, it turned out.

Bread ignorance

Sometimes I eat bread. It is with this as with most things in my life, it moves in waves or "fads" as I call them. You see, a bread is fairly large for a family of one. So when I have bought a bread, I tend to eat bread for breakfast, dinner and supper for the next few days, before it spoils. Yes, I keep the bread in the fridge, which helps. Now, I don't keep it in the freezer, because I don't have a freezer. And besides, it is one single bread. Usually I manage to eat it all eventually.

Often when I buy bread, I picked what is around here called "toast" bread. These breads are of uniform shape and cut into slices already. Presumably these slices fit into a toaster, thus the name. But it also saves me the time and trouble of looking for my bread knife and then cutting the slices myself. So it is convenient. I haven't particularly compared the prices of "toast" bread and ordinary loaves of bread; after all, bread is bread, right?

Wrong. So very wrong. Yesterday for the first time I actually looked at the prices on the shelf, and was shocked to my bones. The uncut bread cost kroner 4, or 63 cent. Woah, that's pretty cheap for almost a week's worth of food! But the "toast" bread cost kroner 15, or $2.36. Since I assume the toast bread is baked in standard-sized forms (rather than baking lots of breads and picking the ones who just happen to have the right shape) that's nearly $2 for cutting them into slices of even thickness. Which, as a friend gently reminded me, you can do for free at a machine in at least one of the shops in the city. (Mega, in the case of Kristiansand. But there may be others.) So, almost quadruple price for the lazy.

Actually, I am not that lazy. Oh, I can afford it easily, which is probably why I never noticed before. But basically I just thought that bread is bread, OK? I don't check whether some wares are priced crazy, unless they are expensive wares so I can't avoid noticing. For instance in one shop (Kiwi Langenes) I found a bottle of drinking water once that was priced like wine. Perfectly ordinary water. They must have presumed that people don't check the price of water. They almost got away with it too, but now you know what they did. And the example with the bread was from Rema 1000, the cheapest shop in the city.

I'm not really angry about it. In a way there is a poetic justice to it: If I am rich enought to not notice the difference between $0.63 and $2.36, or lazy enough to pay that much for the slicing, or if I am rich enough to actually have a toaster (most likely explanation) then I got what's coming to me. Haven't I supported the former Norwegian government's attempt to monopolize lotteries for the state, because "lottery is a tax on people who are bad at maths"? I assume something similar is afoot here, a tax on people who don't think ahead before they pay toasters. Or who are snobby enough to buy a toaster anyway. Or who are too stupid to check prices. The stupid is like a fruit tree growing in the forest: Anyone who passes by will take what they can.

In my case, however, I am not stupid. Well, not in that respect at least. Just ignorant. And ignorance can be cured. Paying quadruple price for basic foods is a pretty good cure, for me. Your mileage may vary.