Wednesday, April 20, 2005

but what if your family don't like bread?

Pseudoephedrine is not the worst case of someone "ruining things for everybody else" at the grocery store, however.

The Kroger nearest to my (old) house has moved baby formula behind the customer service desk. They would only do that if it was being shoplifted very frequently. What kind of a world do we live in when the most-stolen item is baby food? Who is stealing this stuff?

Are there really that many people out there who can't afford to feed their babies, and who would rather steal the formula from Kroger than to try to get help from the government or charities?

The steps that Kroger has taken almost make me suspect that there must actually be an organized ring of people dedicated to stealing baby supplies and selling them on the black market. Individuals stealing to feed their own families can't be the whole story, can it? But WTF? Who buys baby formula from some guy on the street?

The knee-jerk paranoid white guy in me immediately jumps up to say that it must all have something to do with illegal immigrants. The knee-jerk bleeding heart that somehow got planted in me asks, why isn't anyone helping these people so that they don't have to steal to keep their babies from starving? What can I do?

None of these are rhetorical question, I really want to know.

Comments:

Are you suggesting that baby formula has suddenly become a hot item to steal because the theives are putting it up on ebay, or are you proposing ebay to me as a viable alternative to dealing with the BS at the supermarket? I'm guessing both.
the Nashville farmer's market, a.k.a. fence central, often has folks selling baby formula (usually powdered mix). I've always assumed that much of the stuff in the "non-produce" section is stolen. To support your paranoid white guy theory, much of the clientele is non-Ingles speaking.