Titanic Struggle With Kroger Cheese

I know what you’re thinking, either, “He’s got too much time on his hands,” or “There are wars and hunger and people with real problems in the world, and look what his comfortable ass is complaining about.” Obviously, I thought of these things before I posted. So, maybe this is frivolous. But haven’t you on many occasions wished you could get a picture of one of the many nagging, frustrating everyday problems that pop up (but shouldn’t) and share it with the world? I decided to act on that wish.

The deal is that after a day of dealing with problems, when you get home at night you want things that are supposed to go smoothly to, well, go smoothly. Easy-open food products should not become yet another fire you have to put out. Take the Kroger “easy” open and seal 16 oz. shredded cheddar cheese bag depicted herein. It’s touted as being convenient: just pull the top strip off and voila, you’re in cheese heaven. Except whoever shoddily manufactured the bag didn’t want to cooperate. I tear off the strip and, you guessed it, the strip perforation is higher than it’s supposed to be—so I’m not closer to having any cheese than when I tore the top off. Like the good old days, I have to seek and find scissors to complete this act of “convenience.” Prior to that, though, it was a titantic struggle and a test of manhood to see if I could deflower the remaining quarter of an inch of unbroken cheese-bag hymen by sheer force of hand pulling. I couldn’t, or more precisely, I wouldn’t. Why? Because manys the time I’ve applied the greatest pull-apart force on bags of chips, cereal, bagged salad and so on only to have the bag rip and explode with a resulting high-percentage loss of product.

When I was in high school in the 70s, we used to have a buzz-cut burly ex-marine, assistant gym teacher who taught social studies. His geopolitical views could be summed up as, “The commies are bad and out to get us.” Among his many horror stories of the Soviet system was that non-capitalist-made book pages and Red toilet paper was full of oversized wood chips.

When I encounter something like the ill-made Kroger cheese bag, it makes me remember that story.

-Evan