Good afternoon from Butler & Bailey Market!
I hope everyone is having a good week. We are getting rain today as I write this. I guess that’s twice in a week after going weeks without any.
We have a new ad that started this week. It has a couple of my favorite things in it. The first is Kurobuta pork chops. We actually had them for supper last night. This is a different kind of pork from a different kind of pig and for my money, far superior to regular pork chops for not a whole lot more money. I often recommend them to people, and afterwards they will come back in the store mad at me for suggesting them. When I ask why they didn’t like them, they say, the problem is we loved them and now we will never buy the regular pork chops again. I can’t win for losing, but I don’t mind taking the blame when people find things they really enjoy here. I have always cooked them on the grill, and I used to season them with Regas seasoning before they went out of business. Now, I just season them with whatever I find in the cabinet. Anything seems to work fine for me, as long as it is salty. I barely cook them to medium which seems to bring out the best in them.
Another thing in our ad that we eat at least once a week at our house is the chicken thighs and legs. In my family growing up, we always fought over the dark meat of the chicken or turkey, for that matter. You just gave the white meat (breast) to the dog or just threw it away. I think my wife grew up in the white meat world, but she’s been converted over the last twenty-eight years of marriage to me, and now you have to fight her over the thighs. Once again, I cook them on the grill, this time at a low temperature so they get a nice smoky flavor. As you might suspect, I season them with whatever I find in the cabinet as long as it is salty. Ironically, my sodium count is usually low when I go to the doctor, so I figure I just need to keep adding salt for good health reasons.
Now, before you think I am recommending everything in the store just to try to sell you stuff, here’s an item I will never recommend. Mustard! I hate mustard. We have thirty-three kinds of mustard that we sell, and every one of them is terrible. There is even a parable in the Bible about a mustard seed, and basically what Jesus is saying is mustard is terrible. At least, that’s the way it reads to me. I could be wrong, probably am. I’m not much of a theologian, much less a grocery man. Anyways, manufacturers try to hide how terrible it is by adding honey, wine, and other good things to it, but they can’t fool me! It’s still mustard and still terrible. Since we have such a large selection of mustard, customers will often come up and ask me if a certain brand is good, and I tell them no, it is terrible. After they look at me oddly for a minute, they will then ask me which one I would recommend, and I tell them, none of them. They are all terrible, at which point, they look stunned and walk out. Well, I’ve learned that’s not a good approach with customers that want to support the store, so now when someone asks me for a mustard recommendation, I go find a coworker that likes mustard and have them help the customer. Well, there’s thirty-three items out of forty thousand in the store that I’m not going to recommend or try to sell you, but I will still be glad if you buy them.
On a more serious note, I am going to recommend or make you aware of one more thing that we do at the store every holiday season. That is our food drive for Second Harvest and the Fish Pantry. We put together and sell bags of groceries that you can buy that are then donated to those organizations. We have five- and ten-dollar bags, and they are up front by the registers. We have done this for several years and we are always the top selling store, out of several hundred stores in a food group we belong to, as far as how many bags get donated every year. You can pat yourself on the back for your generosity. We just facilitate it; you, our customers, make it successful! You all bought right at a thousand bags last year, and eighty percent of those were the ten-dollar bags. We even had a customer last year that bought a thousand dollars’ worth of bags at one time! I can’t tell you how rewarding it is to be able to work in a community where people care about other people’s welfare as much as they do in Rocky Hill. It is a special place to live and work, and I’m thankful that you have let us be a part of it for the last 36 years.
I hope everyone has a great weekend and don’t forget about the Christmas Parade. It is just a month away!
Tom Butler