Friday, October 28, 2005

Store Front.

I was reading about where to find pumpkin-flavored ice cream (duh, everywhere) on washingtonpost.com, and noticed that my local ice cream shop was not mentioned.

This made me glad, because I hate my local ice cream shop. I am convinced, in fact, that my local ice cream shop is a front for terrorism or drugs. I do not say this just because the guy who runs it appears to be of foreign descent. I say this because I have never seen such indifference to customer satisfaction in my life. You can walk by the Connecticut Avenue establishment on the brightest, sunniest weekend day and there will be only a 50 percent chance that it is open.

Let us say, for the sake of argument, that it's a day they've decided to open. When you get inside, you are met with middling ice cream, surly service and overpriced product. The last (and I mean last) time I was there, the cashier said to the guy I was with, "How did YOU end up with HER?" referencing the fact that I paid. It was not cute. It was mean. And we had paid like $10 for two cones.

When I lived in New York on Second Avenue at 27th Street, I used to go into this convenience store on Second all the time. I would go in there to buy Little Debbie Snack Cakes. I always thought it was weird that there seemed to be no other twentysomething girls buying snacks in the store -- indeed there were no other females at all in the store. It was almost always full of men, seemingly of Middle-Eastern origin but honestly I couldn't say. Then I saw some TV segment about how "fake storefronts" are set up to "sell heroin." You can spot them, I was informed, by the fact that the windows are always blocked by boxes of cereal and detergent, and by the fact that none of the foodstuffs for sale ever seem to get bought.

This is how I figured out that the Tide-adorned store where I had been buying my dusty Nutty Bars was probably a drugstore in the literal sense. I felt really dumb, just like I felt for patronizing my local ice cream store after I realized what a sham it is. Potbelly, on the other hand, sells a nice, cheap, generous cone.

4 comments :

  1. Here's a story a friend recently told me, which he swears is absolutely true, but I'm sure is an urban myth anyway:

    A guy pulls up to the drive-thru of a KFC late at night and orders eight biscuits w/ gravy. Nothing else. He just likes biscuits w/ gravy. He moves up to the window and the KFC dude gives him a box saying, "Here's your eight biscuits and gravy. That will be $100."

    Guy says, "A hundred dollars for biscuits and gravy?" But then he looks in the box. Inside he finds not biscuits and gravy but rather an enormous amount of weed. Seems the KFC was running dope while working the night shift and "eight biscuits w/ gravy" was stoner code for "I'd like the three-piece meal and -- oh! -- a couple of dimebags with that."

    The story ends with the guy telling the police and them arresting the KFC dude.

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  2. Anonymous6:02 PM

    In New York, it's not just the "mohammad and pop" shops that are fronts -- it's the larger grocery stores too, which explains why you can't find something as simple as cooking oil in half of them.

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  3. Anonymous8:51 PM

    you shoulda took that broke ass rundown mofo to sweetlicks. they got some good chocolate chip mint there. don't fess

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  4. Hahaha -- it seems like if someone orders eight biscuits with gravy, they probably do need something to cool out.

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