Trader Joe's

Our favorite supermarket is called Trader Joe's. It's reasonably wholesome - they don't sell anything with hydrogenated fats, or high fructose corn syrup.

Digression: I don't know what's wrong with high fructose corn syrup. Fructose is in lots of stuff that's good, but apparently it's bad. It's funny that people worry about different things here. All the milk (well, the milk we buy) says it's free from RGBST or BSRGT or something like that. I don't know if our British Farm Standard milk had it in, and we didn't care, or didn't have it in, because it wasn't allowed, or might have, or what. There seem to be lots of things like that. It's really hard to get a good kiddy's fruit yogurt that's not full of sugar and has no fruit in. No one seems to worry about that.

Anyway, Trader Joe's is nice to its staff, in that they get health insurance chucked in, and better pay and chances of promotion than a lot of places, and stuff like that, unlike a lot of other supermarkets. The staff are all quite different from most supermarkets - they're much nicer, in a 'We're being nice because we want to be, not because we have a list of stock phrases' sort of way. I chatted with the last checkout bloke about the Tofurkey sausages I'd bought - he said they were good.

There is a bizarre airport theme about the shops, which I don't understand. The entrance is called 'Arrivals' and the exit is called 'departures'. Above the tills there are toy wooden aeroplanes and balloons and helicopters hanging from the ceiling, with no theme to them. It's like someone was sent into town to buy 10 wooden aeroplane type things, all different. In the one near us, there are wheels and landing gear coming out of the ceiling, as if a plane was landing and then a shop was built. It's always hard to explain that to A and D.

It also has silly names on lots of it's stuff. The American stuff has the brand name Trader Joe's, but Italian stuff (pizza, tomato sauce) has the brand name Trader Giotto's, Chinese stuff is Trader Ming's, and Mexican is Trader Jose's. We bought a pack of sliced cheese of different kinds the other day, it was called 'A real crowd cheeser'.