In July, I wrote about the local grocery store’s practice of promising fresh bread at 5 p.m., and then failing to deliver. I accompanied that complaint with this picture of the bread basket, complete with sign, already filling up with trash at 5:33 p.m.:

Today I happened to be looking for bread at exactly 5:00 p.m.

They’d removed the basket entirely. I don’t think this is a permanent departure; rather I think that they have amended their policy to a far more pragmatic one, which might be expressed as ‘If we have fresh bread at 5 p.m., we’ll have fresh bread at 5 p.m. Otherwise, all bets are off.’ Lovely.

But that’s not all the unpredictability afoot!

We don’t subscribe to any newspapers here at Tino Manor; instead, I buy them on those days when I’m out and about in the morning. There is even a newspaper machine nearby, so I can drop in my thirty-five cents and buy the Washington Post without having to stand in line and get a receipt and a bag by buying at at the grocery store.

Except that it’s not thirty-five cents any more. Now, apparently, the Post is fifty cents:

The tiny print under the price on the front page of the Post says

Prices may vary outside Metropolitan Washington. (See box on A4)

The relevant part of the box on A4 says:

Of course, this all depends on how you define ‘Washington Metropolitan Area’. Tino Manor is out in the boonies, to be sure: but it’s well within the Washington-Baltimore-Northern Virginia, DC-MD-VA-WV Combined Statistical Area as defined by the census people. We watch Washington TV stations here. Half the town drives into Washington every day to go to work.

Moreover, the paper isn’t fifty cents everywhere; at the grocery store, you can’t get bread but you can get the Post for only thirty-five cents. I’m not sure whether this is because some places haven’t got the memo yet, or because these people have decided that the cost in terms of customer goodwill and trust is greater than the extra fifteen cents to be had by charging more than the price that’s clearly printed on the thing.

Anyway, so some places and some machines are now charging fifty cents for the Washington Post. What annoys me about this isn’t the extra fifteen cents. Even at fifty cents, the paper is a great bargain, and if it’s a little more expensive there’s some possibility that the lone paper machine on my side of town won’t be sold out before 9:00 a.m. every day.

What annoys me is that it’s more unpredictability. The paper is thirty-five cents, unless you’re outside of an area that’s not clearly, consistently, or constantly defined. This is particularly annoying with something this casually purchased. I’m already incurring enough extra cost in trying to find a place where I can buy the Post without standing in line behind lottery fiends, and where it doesn’t sell out before dawn. I don’t also need to keep track of a private definition of ‘Washington Metropolitan Area’.