Tuesday, June 20, 2017

Good morning, all. Another sunny day to start just like yesterday. And like yesterday we may get thunderstorms in the afternoon. Ours made a lot of noise but no rain that I saw. I will water the gardens later and, I hope, harvest peppermint and spearmint (for the second time). But we have grocery shopping to do. so I may delay the herbs till tomorrow. I found and drowned my first Japanese beetle of the season. It was munching on the strawberries. I haven't seen any beetles or beetle damage on the eggplants or the beans or cucumbers--yet.

There are cute stories of revenge and this is one. Lessons here: don't cut down a tree a man has nurtured for thirty years, don't make him pay for the damage your actions caused and don't screw with an arborist.

So Amazon has decided to buy Whole Foods. Bloomberg had this edge of hysteria article today claiming that Amazon will "kill your local grocer." It made little impression on me. A few years ago we realized that we had four choices for general groceries, not including meat which we buy from a small meat market that sources locally. Those four were Strack-Vantills/Town & Country, Walmart, Target, and Aldi. We never liked Aldi and became dissatisfied with Walmart a long time ago. Target is a pale imitation of a grocery store. So Strack-Vantills and Town & Country have been our mainstays. Now however the the company that owns the Strack-Vantills chain (which includes Town & Country which explains why I treat our three stores as a unit) is in bankruptcy and Jewel has a bid in for nineteen of the stores. Right now our three stores are open but how many Jewel will get, if any, is in limbo. Amazon taking over Whole Foods will do little to either hurt or help our local grocery situation since there are fewer than half a dozen Whole Foods stores in the whole state of Indiana and none of them within easy distance of us.

No comments: