Author: Steve Krause

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AA Food (W)Hole fish monger gets fired; naturally, I have an opinion

As I noticed in today’s Ann Arbor News, an employee at the Ann Arbor Whole Foods store (aka, the Food (W)Hole) was fired for grabbing a “customer.” See the story here, but the brief version (as I understand it) is pretty simple: John Schultz, who was a fish monger at the ‘hole until all this, checked out of work and helped grab a dude who everyone agrees had shoplifted hundreds of dollars worth of stuff from the store. Some time shortly after this, Schultz was fired for violating a company policy on touching customers.

A few thoughts on this:

  • My gut feeling here tells me there is so much more going on with this story that has not reached the regular media or the blogosphere yet. I don’t know John Schultz or know what kind of employee or person he was (though see below) and I wish him only the best in his future. But I am betting that someone at the local ‘hole wanted him fired for a while now and they used this as an excuse.
  • As numerous others have pointed out, if you are a shoplifter, then it seems to me that you are no longer a “customer.”
  • I saw this guy’s picture in the paper tonight, and I am quite sure I have purchased fish and other meat products from him. As I have mentioned in this blog several times before (I like this entry and this one too), I’m a regular shopper at the ‘hole, especially for their seafood and meat products, not to mention coffee, bakery items, wine, and “prep food” items. This is beginning to change a bit though– not because of this incident, but because it’s time to cut down on some expenses. In any event, I recall having good encounters with this guy. So, from a regular customer (e.g., someone who actually gives them money instead of stealing from them) POV, I think it was kind of dumb to fire him. But like I said, I am betting that the reality is that some manager had an “issue” beyond this incident.
  • I know a couple of folks from EMU who have worked for the ‘hole at different times (summer work, part-time while they work part-time teaching, etc.), and I have to say that as much as I enjoy shopping at the store, none of these people seemed to enjoy working there.
  • I’m sure I won’t actually do this, but I am very tempted to hug a Food (W)Hole worker the next time I am in the store, just to see what happens. Maybe even one of the cute ones.

Best of luck to John et al.

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Four more thoughts on the Iowa Caucuses

Oddly, two political posts in a row! Well, four more thoughts, in no particular order:

  • Sure, everyone is excited about what happened last night and everyone wants to say that this means that “such and such” is going to happen. We’ll see, but I wouldn’t want to make a bet that the race is going to be between Hucklebee and Obama quite yet. Having said that…
  • I do think that this does represent “change,” which I think is an interesting way of saying (or not saying) “shift to the left.” This too will be interesting to see if this is a trend that will continue.
  • I watched part of some of the speeches from folks last night (I was flipping around channels), and it was interesting to me how carefully everyone I saw was speaking in terms of volume and decorum. None of this Howard Dean scream stuff.
  • My dude won, but considering the fact that I have in 23 years of voting, I was in the majority for president once (well, twice, since Clinton had two terms), I’m not sure if that’s a good omen or not.
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An Iowan ex-pat on the Iowa Caucuses

I grew up in Iowa– Davenport in much of grade school, but mostly in Cedar Falls. I don’t want to sound like an old man, but I just don’t remember the caucuses being that big of a deal when I was a kid.

I did go to a debate of Democratic candidates in Des Monies in 1984, the first year I could vote (I picked Mondale), and I think I wrote an article about it for my high school newspaper. When I was in college during the 1988 presidential year, I lived with some folks who were very active in working for Paul Simon and Mike Dukakis (I ended up voting for Dukakis). I moved away from Iowa after college, meaning that I haven’t had a lot of first-hand experience with the process since (and it also means I’ve lived outside of Iowa more than I’ve lived in the state). And while my parents and sisters and in-laws will talk politics at family gatherings on occasion, no one in my family is especially politically active. My parents have caucused before (I haven’t), but that’s about it.

So with all that in mind, it’s kind of interesting for me to watch the process this year.

First off, it’s a weird way of electing potential candidates for office. The way that it works, basically, is you go to a precinct of some sort– a school, a church, sometimes even someone’s house– and you chat with folks, have coffee, etc. Then you go to a corner of the room with your candidate– Obama folks here, Clinton folks there, Dodd folks over there, etc. And then, if you are in a group that has less than 15% of the folks there, your candidate is not considered “viable.” So, if you are for Christopher Dodd or Joe Biden or whoever, you basically have two choices: either you stick by your guns and your vote is irrelevant, or you get persuaded to go to a more viable candidate’s corner. Oh, and this whole thing takes time– no just going in to vote and leave. So, to sum up: your vote isn’t a secret, you are being lobbied all the way through the process, and it’s a pain in the ass.

Second, the ads out there have been something else. Usually when I’m back in Iowa, especially in spring or summer, I am routinely amused and perplexed by the advertisements for farm seeds and herbicides. But when I was back for Christmas this year, I was startled by the wall-to-wall political ads, crowding out pretty much anything and everything else, four or five 30 second spots for different candidates all in a row. It started to bug me after about three days; I cannot imagine what it would be like to live with this for months and months.

Is this a way to nominate presidential candidates? Probably not. Much of what you’ve probably heard about Iowa in the national media is true. It is a very white state (though less than it was when I was a kid, especially with an influx of migrant workers from Latin America and Eastern Europe), it is more concerned economically with farming than most other states, and there aren’t that many people there, with more people living within 30 miles of my house than there are in the entire state. And like primaries everywhere, only something like 10 or 20 percent of these people actually participate in the process, and those people tend to be on the extremes on the political spectrum.

On the other hand, there probably isn’t any way to pick a candidate that would make everyone happy, so hey, why not Iowa? Iowans are a well-educated and thoughtful lot, so I’d rather have them making these early decisions than residents of a lot of other places. Because it is a small state, candidates really do have to do a lot of in-person contact with the candidates– my father told me that something like one-third of all Iowans have seen at least one of the candidates speak in some forum, and you can imagine that a lot of folks have seen many more than that. If you had the first test in a bigger state (like Michigan) or in a region of states, you wouldn’t get that sort of contact.

Anyway, we’ll see what happens. I’d be caucusing for Obama, personally. Instead, I’ll keep half an eye on the returns tonight.

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Restaurant Review: The Earl of Sandwich

What and Where:

Earl of Sandwich | 307 South State Street | Ann Arbor, MI 48104 | (734) 213-6762

Ratings (1=terrible, 5=mind-blowingly great)

  • Tastiness: 3.5
  • Service: 3.5
  • Price (1=super cheap, 5=super expensive):3
  • Value: 3
  • General vibe: 3.5

    • Comments

    • It’s hard for me to believe, but I wrote only one restaurant review last year, for a kind of lame place in Ann Arbor (that is surprisingly still open) called Vinology. Why the drop-off in reviews? I have no clue. But maybe this year, even with the unspoken and yet assumed desire to lose weight, I’ll manage to do a few more write-ups about place. Since I’m starting the new year at Earl of Sandwich, it’ll be here.
    • Ann Arbor needs another place for a sandwich like it needs another coffee shop. Just on this block off of the U of M diag, there are six or so sandwich/quasi-fast food places. And yet they still come, I guess because college kids and their ilk eat a lot of sandwiches.
    • The Earl of Sandwich is a chain, albeit a small and (I presume) relatively new one. Apparently, there is some kind of connection to the original Earl of Sandwich, though it’s based out of Orlando, FL. Go figure.
    • I think special orders upset them because there isn’t any choice of breads or style– it’s all white and toasted. On the other hand, the bread and its toasting are very good, and the variety of sandwich choices is about as big as any of the other half-dozen sandwich places around. I am partial myself to the beef oriented ones.
    • Kind of weird decor, in a way. It’s faux quasi-British library with a big screen TV and some clocks to indicate the different time zones in different places. Interestingly, the only clock even remotely accurate was the one for Ann Arbor.
    • One thing that gives this place a bit of a bump over the competitors is they do have free wifi, which I am using right now.
    • Overall, pretty good, though if I was in the mood for something a little more spicy and Italian-like, I’d probably recommend Potbelly’s across the street.
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    I can’t believe this is the first post of the New Year…

    …but it is:

    This morning, I came across a site that I am sure my wife will enjoy and that I am probably going to have to add to my RSS Feed reader: I give you Hello Kitty Hell. The story this guy has is that he’s living in a “Hello Kitty Hell” because his wife collects the stuff. But frankly, I think anyone who maintains a blog about this for a couple of years has got to have a bit of HK fetish himself. Funny stuff.

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    The year that was 2007

    I will probably have to get ready to help Annette pack here in a bit (we get on a plane for home tomorrow morning), but since I’m sitting in front of the computer anyway, I thought I’d write a post about the year that was, more or less, at least according to my unofficial blog:

    Well, you’ve seen the latest stuff from the holidaze if you’re looking now. Wow, that took longer than I thought. I’d better help pack. See ya next year.

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    After X-Mas in Florida

    Normally, Christmas is an “every other year” thing with different sets of parents: one year we go to Iowa, the next year we go to Florida. But because of the way the holiday fell this year, because we decided to celebrate Krause Christmas the weekend before the actual day itself (a good time was had by one and all, btw), and because we don’t start school at EMU again until January 7, we decided to double-dip with family visits. So we flew down to Southwest Florida Christmas day, and we’re leaving New Year’s Eve day.

    Florida is always a strange place to visit for me, and the holidaze time is not much different. It’s nice to be sitting by the pool and enjoying sunny weather in the low 80s, but it is strange nonetheless. It’s a lot more crowded than I remember this time of year, too.

    Anyway, one of the highlights of the trip has been the visit to Everglades National Park and the Shark Valley Trail. Basically, it’s a paved road that goes out into the swamp 7 miles to an observation tower. You can get out there by tram, but, as the video above documents, we rented bikes (well, Bill and Irmgard brought their own and one for Will). The video doesn’t do complete justice because there were a ton of birds, quite a few big turtles, and many many more alligators. From the observation tower, we saw some giant crane kind of bird swim under water, catch a big fish, and gulp ’em down. Pretty neat stuff, though I cannot imagine how awful it would be to be out here in the summer.

    Tonight Annette and I are going out to see Sweeney Todd and out for a fancy dinner. Tomorrow, we’re going to the beach. Monday, we’re going home. And in-between all this, I’m trying to get my ducks in a row for Winter term.

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    Google Reader Boo-Boo

    I use Google Reader as my RSS feed reader, though I will certainly be careful to not use its latest feature, which allows users to mark particular things as articles to share with each and every person on your contact list, regardless of who that person is– friend, work colleague, or, in my case, one of the hundreds of people who I email about something having to do with our writing program. As this user said, quoted in this article, “Google Reader Making More Enemies Than Friends,” “What genius at Google thought that this same list, consisting of hundreds of people from all sorts of parts of my life, would be the same list I’d want to share my Reader entries with?”

    The article goes on to make the connection with the problems Facebook had with Beacon (which I never used personally but which also shared a bit too much), and for me, both of these things suggest two closely related things. First, contrary to a lot of concerns from various privacy folks, many– maybe most– users of services like Google Reader and Facebook are savvy enough to realize that there are things that they don’t want to share with just everyone. I think about this with Facebook frequently enough, and certainly with my own blogging habits. And second, there is a line out there– fuzzy though it may be— which, if crossed, users will raise flags and backlash against companies like Google and Facebook. So far, these providers have been willing to respond to those customer needs, too.