Safeway treasures

Way back in 2010, I wrote about a friendly neighborhood Southern grocery store where they sell regional essentials like butt rub and slop mop. I was thinking about regional products today while we shopped at a Safeway in Truckee, California. Hooray for vacations!

We don't have Safeways in Durham, so it's hard to tell if the items we saw today are particular to Safeways or particular to California. Among the most interesting:

1. Individually wrapped prunes. I guess this is a "value pack" because it includes multiple individually-wrapped prunes, sold at an equal or lower cost compared to the same quantity prunes cavalierly tossed into a single container without plastic film preventing them from touching one another. Or maybe they're individually wrapped because prunes are what Californians like to give to trick-or-treaters on Hallowe'en. Or perhaps the plastic sheaths discourage calorie-conscious consumers from indulging in more than one prune at a time.*

2. Potato chips that were packed at ~150' elevation and then trucked up to ~5,820' elevation. Assuming the temperature in the Salem, Oregon, potato-chip packing plant is about the same as the temperature in the Truckee Safeway, this poofed up bag demonstrates that the air pressure in Truckee is lower than the air pressure in Salem. This has me wondering whether the bag would burst on top of Mt. Whitney, the highest point in the continental U.S. at 14,505', although the temperature up there is probably significantly colder than at the packing plant. (S asks who would carry a bag of Kettle chips up to the top of Mount Whitney. I suppose the answer now must be "I would," were I ever to climb Mount Whitney.)

3. Gluten-free butter. Butter in North Carolina is gluten-free too, as is butter in every other place in the world, but in North Carolina we don't boast about it.

4. Recreational weed is legal now in California, although it does not appear to be sold at Safeway, at least not anywhere obvious to folks who aren't looking for it (like the butt rub and slop mop at King's Red and White). But apparently there's some work to do to get certain demographics to purchase it, as indicated by the copies of Women & Weed in the impulse-purchase magazine rack next to the checkout aisles. You can tell this magazine is for women because the cover is pink. It works for guns, so why not weed magazines? We were unable to locate any copies of GPQ on the racks (Gentlemen's Pot Quarterly).

*Update: The idea of individually wrapped prunes really bothered me, given that the plastic packaging is unnecessary, excessive, and non-recyclable, so I turned to the interwebs seeking an explanation. Here it is: https://www.packworld.com/article/package-feature/safety/tamper-evidence/sunsweets-ones-kind-prunes. Sunsweet has been doing this since 2007, because wrapping individual prunes in 48-ga PET/80-ga oriented polypropylene film "helps consumers overcome the stigma of eating prunes." What about the stigma of trashing the environment?