Notes From A Bear's Journey

     Recently there have been more and more non-alcoholic products making the news.  When magazines such as Bon Appetit and Bloomberg Businessweek start to devote entire sections to the products, then something is indeed hitting the shelves.  All of which led one magazine to ask, who are the people asking for such "drinks?"  Some are speculating that Gen-Z (those grouped as now being 12-27) are the driving force, although I often wonder if social "analysts" are just looking for a simple stereotype.  I say that because in my state (Utah), the Mormon culture practices avoiding both caffeine and alcohol, which has given rise to a chain of "dirty sodas" as defined by the Swig franchise and recently featured in The New Yorker ; drive around this state and Swig drive-throughs are nearly as numerous as Starbucks, if that makes sense.  But non-alcoholic products have moved way past beer (Miller and other brewers tried "low" alcohol beer for a bit...

Graphic:  Roadkill Tees       Other than magic or illusions, nobody likes to be conned.  This can be something small, like when the sale price doesn't ring up at checkout; or it can be huge as in your life savings vanishing in a flash (or after an election).  But those are financial, and there are many other ways of being fooled...think the car salesperson, or the timeshare, or the politician; the "forked-tongue" of yesteryear suddenly becomes an apt description for most of those cases.  But the grocery store?  Picture this headline from The Guardian : Major egg companies may be using avian flu to hike US prices ; a related piece had this: US’s biggest egg producer’s profits triple as prices soar... Cal-Maine’s profits nearly eight times as high as at the start of the bird flu outbreak.   In the fascinating book by Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries , the world and history of our markets is explored with extensive research and p...