Why must my favorite supermarket stock different items at different locations even though the distance between these locations is only a few short miles?

Case in point:  I want a store brand diet cream soda.  Store A has it, but Store B doesn’t.  I also want Chips Ahoy Chunky Chocolate Chip Cookies, which Store B has in stock but Store A doesn’t.  So in order to get the all the grocery items I want, I have to go to both stores.

What a load of crap.  And then the worst of it is when I want to get a few cases of my favorite Snapple drink, Diet Lemonade-Iced Tea, which my supermarket doesn’t stock at ALL.  There’s only one market in town that does, and of course they just HAD to be in Ghetto-We-Shoot-White-People-For-Fun-Ville.  Still, I love this Snapple flavor enough to risk dodging molotov cocktails just to grab a few, and besides, after you’ve stepped over enough chalked outlines of dead bodies and broken glass as you make your way to Aisle Number 5, you kinda get used to it after a while.

Still it’d be really nice if just ONE supermarket could stock ALL the grocery items I buy on a regular basis.  Is that really too much to ask?  Stupid economy.

“Mary Ann’s mother died.”

Mary Ann had once been my commanding officer when I was reserve cop in what seemed like another lifetime ago.

“I’ll send a card and some flowers,” I said.

“No, you’re going to attend the funeral with me.”

“I’m not coming to no funeral.”

“Why not?  It’s the right thing to do.  You should go to pay your respects.”

“Look, I’m not going to no funeral where they got an open casket with a dead body inside and everyone’s mingling around 10 feet from it like they’re at a cocktail party.  It really creeps me out.  So, um, NO.”

“You only have to stay for a few minutes, but you really should go pay your respects.”

“NO.  END OF DISCUSSION.”

“What if there are a few pretty girls there that might need consoling?”

I thought about that for a minute.

“I’ll drive.”

So you’re offering free communication with matches this weekend?  Really?  Then why is it when I want to “Fast Track” it and email a match directly so I can bypass the 5 million questionnaires you normally force us to send each other, that I’m instead redirected to a payment page where you literally scream in big honking words fabulous payment plans that start at $60 a month?

Oh I see, you didn’t actually mean I could talk to a match, just that I’ve been granted the luxurious privilege of trudging through 8 separate steps of trading questions and quizzes, at which point if I somehow actually make it to the final step before the weekend’s up, I’m once again taken to the payment page.

Yeah that’s some real communication you offer there, you tub of money grubbing ass bunnies.

Never mind that you have the fudging balls to plaster big honking BANNER advertising all over my account pages, which I’m sure must nicely pad your already bloated revenue stream, and yet somehow you just can’t find it in your budget to offer even one day of actual communication that doesn’t amount to a pile of fossilized monkey droppings?  Really, not even just one day out of the entire flipping year?

But no, you want me to start ponying up some serious cash just so I can truly benefit from your groundbreaking matching algorithms (which I’m sure involves nothing more than a giant globe of lottery balls spitting out the names of matches at random.)

And yet even with my wallet drained and the system dropping 50 matches into my account (49 of who promptly close their match with me), this is what I’m left with:

29 dimensions of compatibility my ass.

Hot off my Google Reader:

• Priest gets probation for jogging nude at track (AP)
  - I wonder if he was still wearing his collar?
• Cell phone in man’s chest pocket stops bullet (AP)
  - It’s a Royal cell phone service built for one and all, when you get in trouble give this Royal line a call!
• Obese have right to two airline seats
  - Does that include an extra meal too?
• eHarmony Agrees to Provide Same-Sex Dating Service
  - I wonder if I’ll have better luck with this service than I did with eHarmony if I signed up as a male lesbian?

“…believe half of what you see, and none of what you hear…”