drinkerthinker

The Boy’s birthday is coming up soon, and there is much celebrating in the works. His entire family (that's six people in addition to The Boy) will be in town this weekend to consume much grilled meat on Saturday and even more raw fish on Sunday. If you ever have a chance to go out for sushi with my boyfriend's family, do not even think of missing it. I first experienced this three years ago, and there is nothing to compare to seeing a (non-Japanese) ten-year-old get excited about eating a pile of fish eggs wrapped up in seaweed.

Since feeding nine people requires a lot of groceries and we have no car, I fired up peapod.com. For those unfamiliar, peapod is Stop and Shop’s delivery arm. You order all your food online and they come over and drop it on the kitchen floor sometime near when you actually scheduled them to show up. The small delivery fee is more than worth it when you need detergent and five pounds of potatoes and it’s 87 degrees outside.

Peapod tries to be helpful by adding notices to the bottom of the page that tell you what's on sale (baked beans - four cans for $5!) and remind you of the little necessities that you might forget (butter! hot dog rolls! Boars Head meats!). I always thought that these were randomly generated selections, then I glance down and see:

How do they know? That is one piece of consumer data that you do not need to track, thank you very much.