Trader Joe's Ultimatum

TRADER JOE’S ULTIMATUM

SEBASTIAN BEAGHEN AND COLIN LODEWICK

Dearest Joe,

My earliest memories are of Sunday mornings in my twice-widowed m the interstate thirty miles per hour above the limit (she was a bit of a d Pasadena to buy provisions for our family.

mother’s burgundy Dodge Dart, shooting along daredevil) on our way to your modest outpost in

My mother, might call to eco-feminism

Doris Spindle - née Frangello -, was what you oday a “lone wolf,” and an early adopter of radical m.

Following my stepfather Clovis’s unexpected electrocution in ‘76, she redesigned our property to feature austere chain-link enclosures for livestock and quasi-ornamental concrete patios distributed throughout our vegetable gardens, all in a nod toward some level of self-sustenance.

Still those Sunday TJ trips persisted.

It soon became clear to the townspeople we were living “outside t

men never entered the house —

the box,�

and besides the odd insurance salesman,

certainly not pastors.

My personal stake in your business hitherto established, I’d like to bring attention to an issue I have with your “Nacho Cheese Tortilla Chips.”

In the history of American cuisine, nacho cheese is a heavyweight flavor, and the nuances of buttermilk and salt defined my otherwise plain childhood sustenance of jicama and gruel.

I was practically raised on the powder from a fresh bag of your renowned chips – a staple my mother used as a “treat” to encourage good behavior from her children.

Weeding the salve garden without being asked was rewarded with a generous spoonful of nacho cheese powder, which my mother gleefully called fairy dust and kept in a glazed ceramic bowl kept atop a lavender-painted hutch in the scullery.

Sadly, this thread tying me back to my childhood has grown frayed. In recent months, I began to notice a marked decline in the flavorful punch of the “Nacho Cheese Tortilla Chips.”

I initially blamed this on having developed a tolerance, as I found myself eating whole bags straight through, searching for the satisfaction that a single finger-lick once sent coursing through my body.

I was able to absolve myself when I started to buy one bag of chips per week and weigh them on a jeweler’s scale.

Ascertaining the mass of these $1.99 packages in karats and dividing by the number of chips allowed me to graph over the past year that my onetime panacea was now a ghost of its former self, and the leech that sucked its vitality was none other than you, Giotto.

Joseph, where did things go wrong? What made you decide to mar a previously pristine lineage of corn-based crisps? Was it worth it to forfeit your lion’s reputation for a few meager pennies? If you cannot restore the production of these chips to their original zest, at least allow me to purchase the seasoning in bulk and meter it out as I please. I am not a fussy man. Give me the keys to the castle and I will fly.

Yours (pending the restoration of my favorite snack), Dr. Harold Spindle, Esquire.