That's No Moon

When a big part of your household income comes from an industry you tend to learn a lot about it and pay attention to things lots of people don't. Sugar Mama pays a lot of bills, hence I know a lot about groceries. ?

It would except restaurants have been closed for awhile and I'm sure their cash flow sucks right now Yes, and all of that is tax deductible. A stadium naming deal is not.

It's so much about this. Settlement doesn't come together the way he likes so he talks retirement to fire the shot that there isn't any more money coming.

They really aren't. Produce is often a big differentiator, as are service deli, butcher and prepared food. Some stores have in house butchers, some don't, it makes a difference. Some have a service deli counter some are all prepacked, some have prepared food some don't some is good some is not. The center store is often similar but not the same as some stores have many fewer products and more own brands, some have 20 kinds of mustard (no joke). The meat stores get all comes from different suppliers and it can be very different quality. The produce comes from different places too and some stores are ok with having B produce on the shelf and some aren't. Some stores are really good at staffing the departments and rotating stock and keeping things fresh, some are not. They are the same in that they all sell food, yes that's true, but they all have their own differences. I like Wegmans and Harris Teeter generally. Publix and Kroger are a little hit or miss. I hate Food Lion. Acme, Giant and Shop Rite are most of what I have locally and they are pretty much a toss up though I prefer Acme's meats. The other thing WNY people need to realize is Wegmans outside of WNY are a little different than those in WNY. They are usually bigger and more of a destination type store than what you typically find in the WNY home market area and there are many fewer of them. I haven't been to every Wegmans in WNY but for the 3 or 4 I've been to often enough to make comment that is the case. Edit: yes I know Kroger owns Harris Teeter now.

Southeast PA. Admittedly I'm not in Wegmans often but I feel like every time I'm there they are .69 I'm sort of trained to look whether I'm buying them or not and I'm usually taking pictures of some sort of produce when I'm in a store. Like I said though, if they are .49 it's because customers in the area are demanding that price point and the rest of the prices in produce are suffering for it. It doesn't cost less to get bananas in WNY than it does in the city where they unload a lot of them off the boats. In fact it probably costs significantly more when you factor transportation costs into the mix. You pay for those .49 bananas in every other item in the department.

That's kinda the idea, but it helps drive incremental sales.

It depends on the department. Center store name brand items? Yeah, margins are pretty small. Other places in the store, not so much. Margins on the things Wegmans is good at like prepared foods are pretty high. They also have a lot of own brand merch in the center store and fewer national brands by design. There is much higher margin on own brand stuff so if they carry fewer SKUs of national brands and more of own brand and have a decent quality own brand, they will make more money in the end. You wouldn't believe the sheer number of different products out there and some stores go crazy with the number of SKUs they have trying to carry all this different stuff. The ones that make money don't do that. They have the core national brands or regional brands that customers demand and a solid selection of own brand. My wife was category manager for the produce department and then the seafood department for a major grocery store chain so I assure you I've heard about this enough over the last 20 years and I've double checked more than one P&L sheet over the years. Margins on individual items may be small if they are on sale but as a department whole they really don't change. It depends on the store's business model of course, whether it's a "high/low" store that runs a lot of sales and such but then buffers that by having higher margins on other items or if it's an "everyday low price" store that runs less sales across the board. The margins in the stores are about the same but they get there in different ways. Smart stores will merchandise coordinating items near or with items that are on sale so people pick those up as well when they grab the smoking good deal. Of course the margin on the coordinating items is usually pretty high so the store makes up the dollars they are losing by putting the other thing on sale. One thing my wife would do a lot when she was in that role was "meal solutions" she'd have something like broccoli crowns or halibut (not exciting) that she'd merchandise together with other things so that a customer could walk into a store, see this group of things right next to each other that could easily be built into a meal with a recipe card or something and people would pick up all of the items all the time. Sure one of the them would be on sale, the other stuff wouldn't be, it would be stuff she got a good cost of goods on so she was able to have a massive margin on those things and she would crush sales on those things for the week. The next week it would be something different built around what she could get a good cost of goods on, wash/rinse/repeat but to the customer it looks like something new and fresh every week. One thing that used to make her crazy was that consumers tend to judge the overall prices of a store based on the price of bananas. Hence, there is strong incentive to keep bananas cheap which then, in turn, forces the rest of the prices in the produce department to be higher to support the low banana price. Whereas if you charged a dime more for bananas everything else could be cheaper. Customers don't generally see it that way so if you go to a store because they have 49 cent bananas rest assured the other stuff in produce is more expensive. Wegmans bananas are usually 69 cents and basically never go on sale. Take from that what you will. Also, there is ZERO ROI in a stadium naming deal. None. It's setting money on fire so the honchos at the company can get their butts kissed by the team and get things like VIP access to stuff and a fancy lux box or two. That's all it is. Given the restrictions that will be in place this year that will limit all of that corporate ball washing I'd expect the stadium to go unnamed at least for this year.

He's the 25th highest paid RB in the league by AAV (2.9M AAV with 2.4M guaranteed at signing) That said he's 28 and the clock is ticking for him to be able to make money. He won't be a FA again until he's 30 and by then it's too late. I get it from his point of view. It doesn't mean that anybody will acquire him to give him more money and I certainly don't know what his expectations are but when Duke Johnson is making 5.2M a year AAV and got almost 6M guaranteed. and Mike Davis is making 3M with 3M guaranteed there is probably someone willing to pay him something in between those two contracts without thinking about it too hard.

Also a Canisius grad. More years ago than I'd like to admit.

Replaced

Good thing they don't have earthquakes there which would make the thing sway unnaturally and shift loads around all over the place. If I'm going to watch the game on TV I'm going to do it at home and save a bunch of time and money.

Good organizations don't often need any extra motivation going into a week. Pittsburgh is a good organization. The Bills, generally over the course of their history, are not. When the Bills have a quarter of the success Pittsburgh has had they can start to talk.

They really really reaaaallllly need to not poke the bear by playing that song this year. They won the game. Take the dub and go about your business.

So detain him and move on. If they were fine leaving him lying on the ground with blood coming out of his ear then they would have been fine leaving him on the ground with his hands and legs zip tied for the trailing officers to pick up. This is also the danger of allowing the President or whoever else to come out and just label people. He states that he's going to declare Antifa to be a terrorist organization (I'm going to ignore that the Klu Klux Klan isn't even labeled as a terrorist organization and I'm also going to ignore that the laws are written specifically for FOREIGN terrorist organizations so as not to trample people's Constitutional rights which is WHY the Klan isn't listed). Then he insinuates that this person is an Antifa operative. Ergo the President of the United States just called this guy a terrorist. That guy. He's what we created anti-terrorism laws for? Read through some of what those laws entail and decide if that's what we want politicians on either side labeling their opposition (American citizens, with rights) and then having the full weight of the federal system behind them to back it up. FTO list and some explanation of what that designation means.

He kinda did, just not in the way they like to think he did.

Then Buffalo doesn't deserve him and I hope he walks if that's the way it's going to be.

Went to the Outer Banks last week. It was empty. Probably going to Vermont in July. Going back to OBX in August.

Despite all my rage, I'm still just a rat in a cage.

I believe I have heard that. It can out a car at a place at a time. Doesn't necessarily mean a person is driving without other evidence but they use it to piece together timelines or poke holes in alibis.

I know it isn't, but it looks like Heather Graham

We had a plate mounted one on our Chevy Lumina APV in the early 90s because of the windshield angle. But again, not an insurmountable issue and something I think they are well aware of at this point. The stupid transponders worked well enough 25 years ago that we had to take it off and leave it in our mailbox when we wanted to take the car off the Island without my parents knowing about it.

Yeah, I'll have used mine in MD, VA, NC and DE in the last week, all at some degree of speed up to 65mph and there will be no issues. I hear these nightmare stories and I don't know what to do other than shrug because I've never had any of the technical or customer service problems that people report.

Had an ezpass when I lived on the Island pre 1995, very rare issues, easily fixed. Have had an EZ Pass in either PA, NJ or now Maryland (depending on which discount I want to use for a job or which roads I'm driving on most frequently) since I have lived in southeast PA. Very rare issues on Route 1 in Delaware at the ones where you drive through at speed but that was like 10 years ago now and easily solved even at the time. It's my understanding that the tag is tied to your plate and if the tag doesn't register it snaps a picture of the plate and they are able to reconcile the two. I had a tag go bad once and that happened, I got the call ezpass thing when I knew I had money on it and the battery in the tag had died. No fines. Not discounting your problems but I feel like we were some of the first people to get ezpass as Island residents and I've had one ever since, issued by 4 different states and have not had any of those ridiculous types of issues in more than 25 years of using it.

It is a contractual Monopoly granted by a cartel that is neither interested in fairness nor the quality of the product. Can they make more or less money by granting multiple licenses. That's the only question. 2k can make all the football games they want they just can't use the NFLs trademarks e.g. team names nor can they use the players names because the NFLPA has not signed off either. EA pays a premium for exclusivity and has for a long time. They have zero incentive to make the actual game better. If someone wanted to be a smartass I'd love to see a competing game with the teams the NFL has thrown aside or a USFL game. Someone owns the rights to that as well and you could have quite a few HoF players in it if you could get that agreement signed. Retro stuff is all the rage. Have a whole retrofootball game and have the WFL, USFL and XFL. Go for it.

8", 5 1/4", or 3 1/2"? Might wanna back it up on a reel to reel to be safe. Perhaps a series of punch cards? How about the "At Last We Can Dance"