I first heard about the So Low store from "Patty Cake," who would offer me bottles of Diet Cola when I dropped by to talk about various North Minneapolis issues, and she informed me the bottles cost a mere TWENTY-FIVE CENTS. She'd tell me I needed to check out this store and its amazing prices...she couldn't even recall what it was called, because she always referred to it as the "used food store."
The store is...
...called "So Low" and it is, I swear, the hidden jewel of North Minneapolis. Brie cheese, 99 cents. Lunchables snacks, my 11-year-old son's favorite, 99 cents. Stinson cheese with apricot or lemon zest...you guessed it, 99 cents. You can eat like a king at this place and get change off a 20. And why shouldn't you? Why shouldn't you own a house with an assessed value of $100k, which you can buy for $17,500 and have $4k in plumbing work done, then move inside, to live on Brie cheese and do whatever it is you want to do? Go to grad school, raise children, blow glass? This is the "Hawthorne Lifestyle," baby. It's creative, it's affordable, it's sustainable...and it moves ever upward, toward what the Founding Fathers called "Progress," toward Urban Eco Utopia.
A stock boy at So Low told me the food is "salvaged." I'm not sure how it works, exactly, but I think it goes something like this: somewhere an 18-wheeler is hauling a load of ice cream cones, when a dumb ass talking on a cell phone and driving at the same time cuts the trucker off while changing lanes without signaling, because his left hand is BUSY holding the phone.
The driver of the 18-wheeler takes evasive action too hard, and jack knifes on the 394. Lots of ice cream cones tragically die (the trucker walks away without a scratch, the dumb ass on his cell phone never even NOTICES the spectacular accident behind him) and now some insurance company steps into the picture.
At some point, three fourths of a cargo of perfectly good ice cream cones falls into the hands of wholesalers who routinely deal in such salvaged cargo. And that cargo makes its way to North Minneapolis to be sold for pennies on the dollar at So LOW!!!!! Your bargain price leader! It's located near the intersection of Emerson Ave. N. and Lowry Ave. N., in the Jordan Neighborhood. But BARELY!!! Just BARELY!!!! If you buy a snack at the checkout line and start walking with it, you could be in Hawthorne before getting your snack unwrapped.
If I had known about this place all my life, I may have never taken up the practice of dumpster diving used bananas with hot women like Connie Nompelis on Valentine's Day.
Side note: if I was on a Dell computer right now, instead of a piece of (expletive) Apple, I would create some live links to a few good trucking songs on YouTube. But since I'm on a SUCKY APPLE COMPUTER, you will just have to hum "Convoy" without any background music.
"It was the dark of the moon, on the 6th of June..."
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