The south end of the beach at Hua Hin, Thailand.
Where are Kevin and Ruth now? Hua Hin, Thailand.

Where are Kevin and Ruth going next? Maldives on March 23rd.

Monday, August 15, 2016

We want our money back!

Very often when you buy fruit in the grocery store, you don't know what you're getting. Oranges, cantaloupe, watermelon, and pineapple are all fruits that we have bought where you don't know until you get it home to eat it if it's any good on the inside.

And we're not putting up with it any more.

With the price of fruit up here in the great white north (and it's not much different in the U.S.), we've decided that if we buy something that's no good, we will make the extra effort to bring it back and get a refund.

Grapefruit are too expensive to begin with. $1.50 each for a grapefruit? Ridiculous.

The last straw was the watermelon we bought last week. When you buy a watermelon for $4.00 and cut into it the next day to find out that it's pretty much rotten, we are no longer going to simply throw it out. Usually, there's at least something salvageable, but not this time. We put the whole thing in a plastic bag and put it back in the fridge. We'll return it on Wednesday and get our money back.

We've pretty much given up on buying oranges. They're either too difficult to peel, or don't taste very good, or have too many seeds. Fussy? For $1.50 a pound, you bet we're fussy. I remember when we were in Portugal in 2007 you could pick oranges right off the tree and they were delicious. Can't buy them like that here though.

On the bright side, we do get some decent apples, and they're usually on sale for $0.99 a pound. Not bad. And there have been a lot of nice grapes lately, and even cherries. I love cherries, and often don't mind paying a premium to get some nice ones as a treat.

It's hard to get decent strawberries too. They all seem to be the oversized steroid strawberries that they grow in California. Seriously, they don't even look natural.

We look forward to what we've read about the markets in Romania. Seems very similar to what we find in Mexico. Great quality fruits and veggies, and at a reasonable price!

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Here's a great new hobby for the RV!

Learn to Play Ukulele Starter Kit

And in Canada, a fantastic deal on the Garmin GPS runner's watch...

Garmin Forerunner 225 GPS Running Watch





26 comments:

  1. Ha, I learned how to play the uke after I started RVing. It is a small, easy instrument that fits perfectly in an RV. Ukuleles come in four different sizes, though, and I like the tenor size the best, easier for adult fingers.

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    1. That's too funny! How come we never knew this? :-)

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  2. We have taken fresh food back a few times and have never had a problem getting a refund. Like you we just threw food that rotted far too quickly into the garbage but at the prices we pay today, no more. Norma bought an expensive tray of strawberries the other day and after only one day they were inedible. This is ridiculous.

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    1. We have done this a few times over the last few years. I can remember once a couple of years ago when I was with Lindsey in Swift Current, I had bought a bag of apples, we got out to the car and wanted one to munch on on the way home and bit into it and it was disgusting. Didn't even make it out of the parking lot, took the bag back in and got our money back, no questions asked. Hopefully I won't have any problems with the watermelon, seeing it will be a whole week later. No more throwing bad food in the garbage!

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  3. We have been having a real issue with the quality of fresh everything at the local Publix's. Anneke always takes it back when it is poor quality. I am sure they have her picture of someplace with a big X through it:)

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    1. Good for Anneke! Maybe if we all started doing this they would start putting out some decent produce. Actually for the most part we really don't have too many issues with the product not being good.

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  4. I had heard that Walmart will refund if your fruits/veggies aren't good - don't know anyone that has tried it though.

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    1. Yes they will, we have done it before but this watermelon wasn't at Walmart so we will see! Fingers crossed.

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  5. We buy the best fruit at farmer markets. Most of them will cut one of their produce and let us have a taste.

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    1. Unfortunately we aren't in town when they have the farmer's market. It is normally on a Saturday and we need to be at the park then. We really miss the markets in Mexico, the produce is cheap and it is delicious!

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  6. We like to buy the fresh local fruit and veggies at the many markets or roadside stands in this area, always good and quite reasonable, very seldom from the grocery stores here in Canada because it is not fresh and usually imported.

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    1. Unfortunately out here in the middle of nowhere, markets aren't an option. If we happen to know if someone going to a Hutterite Colony then we might be able to get them to pick us up some produce like we got a few weeks ago.

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  7. Gotten that way too - important to get what you expected for your hard earned dollar.

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  8. That's one of my pet peeves, too. Vegetables aren't so bad, but getting decent fruit anymore is not easy. We spent a good amount on fresh fruit from the outdoor market here and got home to find most of it bad. And don't get me started on watermelons! The only good watermelon we've ever had was when we lived in Arkansas and people would sell them (cheap) out of the back of their pickup trucks from Hope, AR. And they were REAL watermelons...not the seedless variety that have no flavor. I refuse to pay top dollar anymore for fruit that is usually bad. If I can, I take the bad stuff back, too. We have found that organic, heirloom varieties from local stands seem to have the best quality.

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    1. Totally agree with you Lori, we rarely have problems with our veggies. Our best watermelon has been in Mexico same with strawberries.

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  9. A recent article in Consumer Reports stated 40% of the food in the US is wasted. Their beef was vague, I'll-defined, and unregulated "Purchase by" and "Best by" labels that cause people to toss stuff that's perfectly good. (I'm not that much of a lemming.) I would be interested to know a number even harder to quantify: Fruit and vegetables that are more than 25% inedible (forget tasteless, I mean rotten) after cut open (lettuce and potatoes are common ones), as you said, AND huge portions served in restaurants that are left on plates or to rot in take-home containers. It's disgraceful.

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    1. We believe it! Working here at the campground we see so much food that is thrown out! When we go shopping we always try to buy the freshest products that we can see but that doesn't mean that once they are home and don't get used right away that they will be tossed once the "best before" date has come and gone. That is only a suggestion, it doesn't mean the food is bad. Normally food doesn't have time to go bad in our fridge and it is very, very rare that food of any kind gets thrown into the garbage in our "household"!

      Agree with you as well on the huge restaurant portions, such a lot of waste. Disgraceful is a good word to describe the whole food waste issue.

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  10. Have had bad luck with avocados recently. They are so popular now I think they are picked too green and don't ripen. Not buying any at the moment!

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    1. Try googling "how to ripen an avacado"! There are several suggestions and maybe one of them might work.

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  11. You have to buy local in season. But that means the watermelon should have been good but not the oranges or grapefruit.

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    1. Yes, we always try to buy in season and watermelons should be in season! Hopefully when we are in Spain next January and February the oranges there will be in season. :-)

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  12. Don't you just love open Mexican markets where you can taste the fruit no matter what size or shape it comes in!

    It's your money, I've done that with cooked rib eye steaks here in Mexico (fancy cut and I traded it in for good ole national Mexican rib eye). A friend of mine did it in California with a skillet full of half-cooked eggs. They'll take it back, they don't want a stink.

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    1. Yes, we love love love the Mexican markets where we can see, smell, feel and taste that wonderful produce!

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  13. What a fabulous header picture! You are so right about how hard it is to get good anything in grocery stores. Good for you for taking it back. It's bad enough that they use chemical fertilizers and pesticides on our food but to have it be so old that even with that stuff it rots. Disgraceful is the word!

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    1. Yep, disgraceful for sure, especially with the prices that they charge for the produce nowadays!

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