A Very Public Service Announcement

You know, folks, I've been buying food in bulk for years. I love getting candy and nuts from the bulk section at the grocery store, where I can control the amount, and my parents used to take my sister and I to those co-op type places where a lot of stuff was in bulk and where all the signs were hand-lettered and the checkout person was either a skinny long-haired guy in wire-rim glasses and a t-shirt with a whale on it or a woman with slightly thicker glasses, jeans not quite as faded as the skinny guy's but still somehow looked like she had done more actual work in them, and that expression in her eye that said, "Yeah, I'm a hippie, but I'm still not a dummy, so don't try to give me any shit".

So yeah, I know my way around a bulk food place. Thus, I think I have good background of experience when I say:

It ain't too terribly hard to fill the plastic bag with whatever you're buying, and get that twist-tie around the top of it, without dumping at least two cups' worth of it on the floor.

And yet, nevertheless, every time I enter the bulk area at The Store with broom in hand, the floor looks like the storm-cellar in Twister after Helen Hunt's daddy has been sucked out the door. Oatmeal, walnuts, peanuts, chocolate melting wafers, M&Ms, Reese's Pieces, jelly beans...all over the damn place.

Not a day goes by that I don't thank whatever Gods there are that we no longer sell bulk pet food. I wake up in the middle of the night, cold and clammy from the sweats, at the thought of what these people would do with a barrel full of birdseed....