11:05 – It’s back to work for us. At the moment, Barbara is filling sodium dithionite bottles for forensic kits. That stuff has an obnoxious odor, although fortunately not a strong one. It smells like something died. It’s used as a reducing bleach in forensic fiber analysis, and also for bleaching wood pulp in paper mills, which is probably a good part of why they smell so terrible.
Colin is still basking in his Best Dog Ever laurels. This morning when I called him, he actually stopped what he was doing and came on the run.
I decided not to order any Augason Farms stuff yesterday. If there’d been free shipping with a $50 order, or even $100, I’d probably have ordered a few cans each of powdered eggs and butter powder. But I really didn’t want to order $200 of stuff, at least until I get a better handle on our current food inventory levels.
Speaking of which, when I put in an Amazon Prime order the other day, I opted for free no-rush shipping in return for a coupon that provides free shipping on one Prime Pantry box. Then I started looking in Prime Pantry for items we use. Originally, PP had some very good deals on stuff, cheaper than I could get it at Costco or Sam’s, even counting the $6 shipping charge. That’s no longer true. Everything in PP costs more, even with my free shipping coupon, than it would at Walmart, let alone Costco or Sam’s Club. For example, a case of 10 cans of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup sells at Sam’s for a buck a can. It was $1.25/can in Prime Pantry. The same was true on the 20 or so other items I checked. Amazon was always at least noticeably higher and often much higher. Amazon is apparently following the old tradition of undercutting competitors’ prices to gain market share and then boosting prices above what competitors charge.
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