Thursday, October 7, 2010

Seattle: The Bad

Moving along to Chapter Two of Gino's Seattle Adventure:

You're never more than block from another coffee house, but gas stations seem to be few and far between. Maybe it was the district I was in?

The price of groceries would get the stores shut down in SoCal. I've never paid $1.99 for a can of tomato sauce before, or $5.99 for a pound of Italian sausage. It's crazy. Around here, you would looking at a closer to $1.00 for one, and never more than $4.59 (and usually much lower) for the other. And we have more shit to choose from,too.

Pacific Northwest Asians drive as poorly as the Asians in SoCal.

A California driver's license is insufficient identification to buy beer at Target. Next time, the daughter will not convince me to renege on my boycott. I swear it.

Does everything have to have an organic counterpart?

Yeah, it's a short list. There's not that much wrong with the place.

8 comments:

Foxfier said...

I don't get why everything is so expensive, either-- we're a bloody PORT. Trains! Boats! Airplanes! Direct route to Portland! Even with all the taxes, why.....?

Jade said...

Yes, EVERYTHING has an organic counterpart (as far as I can tell from living up here)

Brian said...

Also, state-run liquor stores, which sucks. (Had that in NC, too.)

Actually, the privatization of liquor sales is the only reason I'm going to bother to vote next month.

The key to grocery shopping (here and almost anywhere) is to figure out where the immigrants are buying their food, and buy as much as you can there. There's one place called Lam's in the ID where you can get limes for 4/$1, onions for $0.39/lb, avacados for $0.79-99, and all manner of greens super cheap (just to mention a few things I tend to buy often). Also all the fish sauce, soy sauce, sesame oil, rice noodles, etc., is about 1/3 of the price at Safeway. Their seafood is pretty awesome, too.

Foxfier said...

Which one are going for? Full privatization or privatize the monopoly? (gee, guess which I favor. ^.^)

Gino said...

brian: i only tried to buy at target. my bad.
mut state run stores i think are the norm in most places.

foxfier: whats the difference? why are you being allowed to vote on it now, and not previously?

Foxfier said...

We're voting on it now because they got stupid, raised taxes on alcohol too high and too fast and got folks worked up enough to respond and put it on the ballot.

Twice.

Basically, right now the state owns distributor rights and hires the distributors, and all alcohol has to go through a warehouse in the Seattle area before being shipped off.
(including beer, although wineries and microbreweries are able to get a license to sell their own product on site)
Anything harder than wine has to be sold at one of the ~300 state liquor stores.

1100 totally privatizes it, including allowing importation of alcohol. (That is, Safeway can buy beer from Budweiser, instead of telling the state to buy beer from Budweiser and then each Safeway store buys it from the state.)

1105 gets rid of the state stores.

1100 is backed by Costco (and Walmart, the grocery stores, gas stations, etc);
1105 is backed by the folks that have the distributor's license right now.
The folks who own the roughly 150 privately-owned state liquor stores (the other half are all state employees) are against both measures.

Foxfier said...

Oh! And 1100 rolls back the tax to 31%, from about 50%.

Brian said...

I prefer 1100 but I'm going to vote yes on both because either is better than what we have.