Working Off the Surplus

FBB's previous post, about our current embarrassment of lime riches, reminded me of another, far-more-damaging case of over-purchasing, which took place many years ago.

When my brother was 7 years old or so (and I was 12), he suddenly developed an affinity for root beer. Naturally, my father picked up several cases of C&C Root Beer at the "soda place." By that time, soda was being sold in disposable plastic bottles, but we still patronized the same establishment where we'd purchased our glass bottles of Hoffman or Cornell sodas, and returned the empty bottles to be refilled. These places are nearly obsolete nowadays, but I will always remember them with great fondness.

In reality, my father probably bought only one case (6 bottles) of C&C Root Beer, but it certainly seemed like a lot more. Shortly after these sodas had been procured, my brother's taste for root beer disappeared, as abruptly as it had developed. We sensed that something was wrong when he repeatedly eschewed the root beer, choosing to drink any other flavor soda that was available, even pineapple. I'm not sure what pineapple soda was doing on our table in the first place, considering that no one in my family speaks Spanish.

So there we were, stuck with a bunch of bottles of root beer that nobody wanted to drink. We'd rather drink water than root beer. Yes, water. From the tap. Or from the garden hose outside.

Our situation started to become desperate, and my father did everything he could to unload that root beer. First, he tried to convince us to drink it, even at breakfast. Then, he recommended that we invite friends over to the house, so that he could try to get them to drink it. That didn't work, either.

One day, with my martyr complex in full bloom, I decided to "take one for the team," and drank nearly an entire bottle of the stuff. I drank it while giving my brother the evil eye, and promised to never let him forget what he had caused (I remind him about it from time to time, 'till this very day). My sister helped me polish off the bottle. Unfortunately, we still had about 5 bottles left.

Technically, we could've just given the remaining root beer away to homeless people, but it wasn't that simple. This took place during the early 1980s in New York City, a period I've referred to as the "Brazen Homeless Era." People were making a very big deal about the plight of the homeless, and frankly, these domicile-challenged individuals were letting it get to their heads. In those days, you could go into a deli, purchase a huge hot corned beef sandwich, and hand it to the first homeless guy you saw outside, and more likely than not, his response would be, "What, no pickle?"

The homeless crowd really started to get uppity with the 1989 launch of the "Street News." The Street News was a newspaper written and distributed by homeless people (mostly on the subways). They charged $0.75 or $1.00 for it, and the seller would get to keep about $0.50 for each newspaper he/she sold. An enterprising fellow could sell enough newspapers in a day to buy about 5 crack rocks.

At its peak, about four months after its launch, the Street News sold one million copies. By 2002, the paper sold only 18,000 copies all year. Interestingly, considering its circulation decline curve, and the obviously liberal slant of its articles, the Street News is really just a poor man's New York Times. Actually, a homeless man's New York Times. They're really the same newspaper, if you think about it. That is, if the Street News had moved into a massive new headquarters building at the height of the New York City commercial real estate market, incurred billions of dollars in debt, failed to develop a realistic, profitable online business model, and sold a big chunk of itself to a Mexican mega-billionaire who will visit all sorts of indignities on its brand in the coming years. Then, they'd be the same newspaper.

Without the homeless distribution outlet as a viable alternative, and realizing that the local squirrels preferred to drink beer out of half-empty bottles and cans they found in knocked-over garbage cans, we had to face the grim reality that our C&C Root Beer inventory would be with us for a while. In this way, we were sort of like the U.S. steelmakers at the time. Eventually, over a period of several years, we were able to finish the root beer, and put the entire sad chapter behind us.

I'm not worried about our overabundance of limes, though. FBB (also known in Blogland as the "comment magnet") seems to have received a quite a few recommendations for the eventual use of these limes. Some of these ideas sound appetizing, others not as much.

No matter how you slice it, though, it's got to be tastier than a root beer float.