A Mom and Pop Grocery Store Makes the Cut – And why it still seems wrong.

DeKalb, Illinois is your average midwestern town, having gone through the financial trends and spurts of the decades like most town's it's size and location. At sixty miles outside of Chicago, it lingered just outside the edge of urban sprawl for most of the end of the last millenium, as early as the 70's, DeKalb area business and land developers rolled out the red carpet for the influx of money that would come with the relocating city folk.

A well known story around town is that of Dee Palmer, a local musician and involved citizen who invested an inordinate amount of money building a high end music store. It was nice, with beautiful display room and expensive grand pianos, but went bankrupt quickly. The market wasn't here. Around town, most Mom and Pop groceries gave in to the larger chain stores. Little Hydrick's on the northeast side, complete with the candy jars behind the counter and aisles barely wide enough for a cart, went broke. About ten blocks away,tucked off of busy fourth street between a laundromat, a gas station, and a car wash, was Inoboden's, another Mom and Pop grocer. This one held on longer than the other's though, because their meat was known throughout the area, and never disappointed. Year after year, the suburbs crept closer, and the chain grocers that had squashed Mom and Pop started getting squashed the by Wal-Mart.

Inboden's was still a goldmine. Come Christmas time, there were lines coming outthe door for their cuts of meat, prime rib, spiral ham, smoked sausage, every niche food you can think of, always down right at Inboden's, at a higher but still fair price. The store itself changed little over the years, it looked much like any other little store had but for the impressive meat counter. Around it the gas station changed chains, the car wash down-sized,and the laundromat eventually went out of business, to be taken over by, Inboden's! The little store that never changed was expanding.

Upon seeing this development, by noting plywood over the laundromat windows, and signs “excusing the construction,” I was intrigued. Over the years I had come to appreciate the store as an anomaly, having found their niche and exploited it to it's full potential, expansion opened up possibilities, but also vulnerability. In a town where the chain stores were constantly crying foul, was Inboden's trying to go big?

The truth is, there wasn't enough property there to expand that way, and they needed some expansion to simply keep up. What they ended up with is a store more than twice as big, set up around the meat counter, with beer and wine and cheese and beautiful hardwood floors. On a Saturday, it was packed, and they were actually running TWO registers, and from all accounts it stays that way. A full-on success story of a Mom and Pop grocery that outlasted the rest and did right. This is the type of thing that should make everyone feel good, even those that fell by the wayside over the years, so why does something still bother me about it?

It was the people in the store on our first visit. As I checked things out, I surveyed the crowd, looking for familiar faces, as all of us that grew up around here make our trips through the businesses as the open and evolve, and I didn't see anyone I knew. This bothers me, that while this business has lasted to a new era, many of it's customers and fellow citizen's have not. Then the new remodel becomes not so much a perfect improvement as to looking much like some specialty store in the mall,complete with unimpressed, slightly rude customers. Looking around the store again, I saw invaders to my once untouched little home town, people who could never appreciate what it took for this place to come this far. After all, they shot up in a month along the highways these days.

For a second, the cynic got hold of me, but could not last, because it's not true. If it looks like a mall store, it is because they are trying to emulate Inboden's, not vice versa. The people are not rude, they are simply strangers,a whole bunch of which should keep finding the little treasure of a store so that it can keep prospering. It is not bad, or anything for me to be bothered about, it is simply change, and there is no fighting it.

1 vs. 100 - Building a Better Game Show

Since I brought it up, and managed to put down three current game shows in my last post, I want to write something good about one of the current prime-time, network programming down-time game show.

In the landscape of prime-time game shows, 1 vs. 100 is a step or two ahead of the rest of them. First of all, the premise unbelievably has a little more meat to it than the rest. Down to it's bare bones, it is still a quiz show, with it's special quirk being a panel of 100 people from varying walks of life and intellects competing against the contestant. The questions are across the board, from pop culture to science and math, somewhere along the lines of Do You Want to be a Millionaire?, maybe slightly easier.

The pace, while employing many drama heightening and time stretching elements, is not maddeningly slow, they can manage to answer more than one question between commercial breaks. The host, Bob Saget, has the smarm knob turned down and moves things along fairly well.

Maybe the best part of it is the musical chair style of guests,called the "the Mob", that are brought in to fill the 100 seats, replacing each "Mob" member that answered wrong. Notable members of the "Mob" are Jeopardy King Ken Jennings, the man who beat him and the man who bested him in the Jeopardy tournament, Poker queen Annie Duke, Hooter's waitresses (for about three questions), valedictorians, janitors, Mensa members, and a nun. The mob has more than their reputation at interest too, as they get to split the pot if a contestant is wrong and they are right.

They are set up on a tall stand, and their booth goes dark when they answer wrong, forgotten until they are replaced at the end of the wrong, unless Saget singles them out for chiding after a particularly simple miss or parting shot.

The help options are slightly clunky, but at least workable, one is to show what the Mob voted, another to pick out two members of the Mob at random with two different answers and ask them why they voted the way they did, and the other a very similar variant of that same option. The Mob members can't lie about their choice and veer the contestant to the other answer, but they are uniformly vague in their answers.

Another good thing about the show is that it stays at pretty much the same time, once a week, though as I write I see a promo for a special Christmas episode. Hopefully they will not start using it to blitz nightly programming like they do everything else that works just a little bit. This show too would get tiresome if ran more than a couple times a week.

Altogether, it makes for bearable programming to watch while the networks gear up for January and bring us new seasons and episodes of Monk, 24, Sunset Strip, Heroes, the Closer, Rescue Me,American Idol, and etc. etc. etcetera.

My Five Reasons NBC Should Drop 'Identity'

The game show Identity with Penn Gillette as it's host is so bad it makes Show Me the Money, and Deal or No Deal, tolerable. I know this is a down time of the season for the networks, and they are trying to get by with cheap filler programming, but this show is beyond mindless, it's infuriating.

5. Slow pace - This, show, moves, at, a, snails, (let's go to a break before I finish this sentence) pace. And I am not exaggerating, Penn makes Regis look like an auctioneer. I am a Penn and Teller fan, and have seen this guy say more in his thirty second intro on his Showtime series 'Bullshit' than he does in an entire show here. I know they are trying to stretch out time, milk it, but this is insulting.

4. The experts - A cross between the American Idol panel of nitwts and the panel from the match game, the 'experts' available to consult as one of the help options are a joke. They are supposedly an FBI interrogator, a body language expert, and some other important sounding title, offer what the contestant is already doing, a guess.

3. They're Cheap - The stakes of winning a prime-time game show have raised, but nobody told these idiots. You take Deal or No Deal to the limit, it's a million, you can win more than that on Show Me the Money, I am told. I really can't stand that show either. The Price is Right gives away more money than this poor excuse for a Prime-time game show, $500,000 if you win it all, ( but you won't, more about that in number one).

2. The premise - This is Deal or No Deal without the hot models holding the briefcases and the banker on the phone. At some point it is just guessing, half of them are obviously easy and there are always at least two that it is simply a toss up. The wait for the 'stranger' as they are called, to tell if the contestant has guessed wrong is as annoying as Penn's slow paced talk, and their catchlines if correctly chosen are worse than campy. This is simply a guessing game, which moves at a snails pace and doesn't pay off.

1. They reneged! - Yes, they reneged, they welched, they cheated, they broke the only rule that should stand in these cheesy game shows, you pay off when they win, and that is why I think this show should disappear like most of its' predecessors. If someone is going to win, despite the odds stacked against them, let them win.

On the Thursday, December 21 episode, the entire hour was a young woman who went though the motions of the excruciatingly annoying show, and I watching her, to play a perfect game through 10 contestants. She guessed 10 identities correctly! Now, the three helps you have are; Ask the experts - which I've spoken of, Tri-dentity - where the field is narrowed down to three(also almost no help), and Mistaken Identity - A bogey, you get to get one wrong, and you're not out of the money.

Let me state that again, as Penn does many times throughout the show,using up time and pushing us toward that alway important next break, you get to get one wrong. Nice, you say, so if she is down to two people with her 'Mistaken Identity' still intact, she wins, it's simple, even if she misses her first guess, she gets another. Wow,cool, this girl played the game good.

But NO! After the commercial break, they come back on and say, that NO, the helps are no good if she is going for $500,000, that she has to guess straight up and risk everything to win it all. As Penn would say on his other, much better television show, BULLSHIT!!!!!

You can't change the rules at the end of the game. Someone is about to win and this comes up? I couldn't have been more annoyed.I mean, just the show is annoying enough, but there simply wasn't anything else on, and the girl was likeable, and winning. Then they stick it to her like that?

Maybe this was in the rules from the beginning, maybe it does make sense even from an excitement standpoint, but you don't drop it in like that. Somebody dropped the ball on this. He either should have been telling her that she would lose that help in the last round so she could use it to guess on those two that could be either one earlier or let her keep it, she earned it, she saved it.She could have taken the chance on the last two people, the ones that were simply a guess. The identities were a 'CSI Investigator' and 'Organ Donor' and the two people left were two middle aged women. It was a toss up even if the one that turned out to be the 'CSI Investigator' did look as if she idolized Marg Helgenberger.

If properly handled, the girl would have known that she should use her mistaken identity on an earlier round. Then she would have known which was or wasn't the 'CSI Investigator'. However, it was never pointed out that she needed too. Everything else was pointed out, elaborated on, drawn out, but not the simple fact that she needed to use her mistaken identity before she lost it.

That's why Identity is bullshit. For now on, I am going to backlog every program I can think of, or egad, not watch television during the time that Identity is on. Really NBC, if you want to go the cheap route at least use the time doing good civil service trapping sexual predators or exposing government corruption with a known to be cheap news magazine show.