Why do paper grocery bags exist?

Picture a paper grocery bag:

They're terribly inconvenient, aren't they?

You can carry a maximum of two, and you'd have to put them down every time you want to do up your coat, open a door, swipe your metropass, answer your phone, or get your keys out of your purse.  If a bottle leaks or it's rainy or snowy out, a paper bag disintegrates. (And, again, if you have more than one bag, you don't have the option of carrying an umbrella.)  It's extremely difficult to do another errand after groceries, because you'd have to put down your bags to select something off a store shelf or reach for your wallet.  Because you're limited to two bags, the likelihood of your peaches getting squished increases.

And yet, they persist.  Someone invented them, someone approved the idea, and the idea is common enough that if you do a google image search for "groceries", a good number of the images are paper bags so brimming full that, in real life, some of your produce would end up on the subway floor.

The first day after paper bags displaced plastic at my the LCBO, I wasn't able to leave the store with my purchase.  I was already carrying several shopping bags which were too full for me to add bottles.  The LCBO cashier handed me my purchase in a paper bag, and I couldn't carry it along with all my other shopping.  There just wasn't room in my hands and arms.  I had to have them do a return on my purchase and give me my money back, because it wasn't physically possible for me to get my purchase home that day.

And yet, enough people think these things are a reasonable replacement for plastic bags that they got all the way through whatever approval process the LCBO has.  And now people are acting as though they're reasonable replacements for all plastic bags when the short-sighted, ill-conceived city-wide ban on plastic bags goes into effect.  (The most frustrating thing was when I wrote to elected representatives encouraging them to vote against the ban and telling them about my idea of using biodegradable plastic bags, which will make environmentally optimal behaviour effortless for citizens, and they wrote back "reassuring" me that paper bags would still be permitted.)

What are these people doing that they find paper useful for anything other than ripening fruit?

How does the driver of the last GO bus of the day get home?

When a GO bus is full and there are still people waiting in line, sometimes they run another bus.  And sometimes they do this with the last bus of the night.

So when they do run an extra bus on the last run of the night, how does the driver of the extra bus get home?  Unless they have an extra driver around who's going to the destination city anyway, the driver of the extra bus ends their day in a completely different city than they expected to, and this well after midnight.  Even if they drove to work, their car is in a completely different city than they are and transit has stopped for the night.

So how do they get home?

Plot hole in my childhood

I've blogged before about my most vivid memory from the single year I did at Montessori school.  I wanted to play with these beads, but the teacher told me I couldn't because I couldn't count to ten.  This confused and frightened me.  I genuinely thought I knew how to count to 100, so I didn't understand why this teacher was telling me I didn't know how to count to 10.  How could I be so wrong about my own ability to count? 

Looking at it with adult hindsight, I see that she expected me to respond by showing her I could count to 10 by counting to 10 then and there.  However, as a 3 or 4 year old child, I wasn't able to draw that conclusion.  I thought she was telling me that my counting wasn't good enough.  Which baffled me - I got to 10 every time, I used the same numbers every time, I could carry on past 10 all the way to a hundred, the numbers followed the same pattern all the way through, how could I be wrong?

In my previous tellings of this story, I criticized the teacher for not being able to make it clear to me what she expected.  If you're an adult in a conversation with a 3 year old, it's primarily incumbent on you to communicate in a way that the kid can understand.  Especially if you're an early childhood educator!

However, there's another, even more egregious problem here: why didn't she take this opportunity to teach me how to count to 10?

You're an adult and a teacher.  You're faced with a small child who needs to be able to count to 10 to play with the toy she really really wants to play with.  You believe this child does not know how to count to 10.  So why not take 30 seconds of your life and teach the child how to count to 10?

What kind of teacher says "Oh, you don't know that" in a blamey tone of voice and walks away rather than teaching???

Plot hole in the 6th season of How I Met Your Mother

I've just finished catching up with Season 6 of How I Met Your Mother, and there's a major plot hole in the whole season.

In Season 6, Episode 5, Architect of Destruction, Ted develops a crush on Zoey, who is protesting the new building he's designing because it will require tearing down the Arcadian.  So Ted comes up with a design that incorporates the Arcadian's facade.  Then, when he learns Zoey is married, he throws out the design that incorporates the facade.

However, Zoey continues to cause trouble for Ted's client throughout the season, getting them bad press and putting the completion of the building at risk.

So why doesn't Ted ever offer his client the design that incorporates the facade?

Were adults more boring in the 80s?

A For Better or For Worse strip that recently appeared in the paper, originally published in the early 1980s.




This is a common trope I saw in media when I was a kid. The protagonist (often, but not always, a child) does something mildly wacky (in this case, running through some guy's sprinkler) and the bystanders - nearly always adults - would be baffled and bemused. This seemed like the natural order of things to me at the time.

But now I'm looking at it from an adult perspective, and I realize that, as adults, we understand why people would run through sprinklers. We did it when we were kids, it's hot out for us too, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who runs through the sprinklers I pass on hot days when my schedule and my outfit allow me to get wet. I've even seen an elderly lady in a walker deliberately walk closer to the grass so that the sprinkler would sprinkle her.

But in this comic strip, the homeowner is scratching his head as though he's utterly baffled that someone would run through his sprinkler. Why doesn't he get it? Were adults in the 80s more boring than adults now?

On one hand, the author of the comic strip was an adult when she wrote it, so she must understand why people would run through sprinklers. On the other hand, she also wrote the idea that the homeowner would be baffled, which means that it seemed like a plausible reaction to her. FBoFW was far from the only medium of my childhood that portrayed adults baffled by childish whimsy that my adult self (and the creator's adult self) would totally understand. What was going on there?

How did networking even become a thing anyway?

I've blogged before about how annoying networking is from the point of view of a job seeker. I recently experienced it from the other side, and it's just as irritating.

I'm not involved in hiring, but I still got a request from a student of my acquaintance for what I as a lifelong job seeker recognize to be an informational interview with the hopes of talking their way into a job. I treated their request as reasonable because I recognize that most job-seeking advice acts as though this is standard operating procedure. But it's an irritant. It takes up my time and doesn't offer me anything in return. I already know this person exists and wants a job, I have a sense of their abilities, but I (and my employer) don't have any jobs to offer. I'd very much prefer that this dance didn't exist.

This makes me wonder why this whole networking/informational interview thing became commonplace in the first place.

The person who was trying to network with me was very good at it and not at all pushy, but I still found it a bit irritating. If it weren't already a standard form, I wouldn't have permitted it to happen. But once upon a time it wasn't a standard form. Which means that, once upon a time, some employer got contacted by some job-seeker with an offer of coffee, an imposition on their time, and a barrage of questions, desperately not saying "Please give me a job, please please please!" This was completely unprecedented at the time, and the job-seeker didn't have the excuse that they're following standard form. But, for reasons I can't fathom, this employer responded by giving the job-seeker a job. And this happened often enough that it's become a standard part of advice to job-seekers.

Who are these employers? Why did it work on them? If circumventing their standard hiring procedures worked on them, why did they make their standard hiring procedures what they are? I just cannot imagine why a person who imposes upon your time and tries to circumvent your procedures would be considered a better candidate than someone who takes you at your word and respects your time?

Insecurity in one's own humanity?

A lot of people seem very invested in the idea of a clear divide between humans and animals.

Once upon a time, I came up with a theory that humans are actually the least advanced species, because we need to modify our environment so much, and the most advanced species must be something like lichen that survive and thrive on some desolate piece of rock. I thought it was an interesting way to look at things differently. I never would have expected the reaction I got - quite a number of people were outright offended that I'd suggest that we weren't the most advanced species!

I've recently been reading a book about how veterinary knowledge might be applicable to human medicine (Zoobiquity by Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and Kathryn Bowers), and it keeps talking about how conventional wisdom used to be that animals don't have emotions, or don't feel pain, or don't engage in non-procreative sexual behaviours - or whatever the topic of the chapter is - and conventional wisdom always seemed to assert that these things were uniquely human and served to distinguish us from the animals. As though they're really invested in distinguishing us from the animals.

But why is this? It doesn't make sense. Why wouldn't your internal self-awareness of yourself as human be sufficient? When I first learned about the theory of evolution, I found it reassuring. Being an animal who evolved out of other animals made so much more sense than humans being special. It makes me feel like we might actually belong on this planet. Why does this need to be more special than the other creatures rather than part of the ecosystem exist in the first place?

Why do they make panties in so many different prints?

I have, unfortunately, been shopping for underwear lately. One thing that surprises me is, especially at stores like La Senza and Victoria's Secret, how many different prints they make panties in. I'm seeing well over a dozen prints available, often with three or more colours in the print, and sometimes a different set of prints for each different style of panties! And sometimes, despite the many many prints available, these panties are available in very few if any solid colours, and quite often not even in the expected prints like leopard print or zebra stripes or plaid or hearts. They're random splotches of multiple colours, or multicoloured variations on the brand's logo.

I wonder why they do this?

Some people, including me, care about the colour of their panties. We want them to achieve a particular look, ranging from blending discreetly under clothes to looking sexy without clothes. If you have a particular colour in mind, a print may or may not work. If you're going for discreet blending or an exact match of your bra, a print is useless. If you want something that looks good with your red bra, the red and white print of the brand's logo with bizarre blue accents might work, but certainly isn't the first choice that comes to mind.

The market for prints is people who don't have specific criteria for what they want their panties to look like, but also care enough about what their panties look like that they don't want plain panties like you buy in a multipack. They must also think prints are significantly superior to solids, for reasons I can't begin to speculate on. And these people must significantly outnumber those who have specific criteria combined with those who don't care at all and are willing to buy multipacks.

Apart from the prevalence of prints over solids, I'm also surprised at the sheer number of different prints available. If a store had maybe half a dozen prints (in addition to a reasonable range of colours), no one would be thinking "Why are there so few prints?" But instead they have dozens and dozens. Each new print needs to be designed by someone, which adds to production costs (albeit marginally).

So why do they do it? Why is it worthwhile to them? And why does it come at the expense of solids?

Soybean and/or canola oil

I recently found out that someone I know is allergic to soy, and apparently soy is in many many things. So, out of curiosity, I started reading labels myself, and it turns out soy is in many many things. But the most annoying thing I discovered was "soybean and/or canola oil". I've seen this on multiple products, and it must be so annoying for people with allergies! Basically they're saying "this product may or may not contain the thing you're allergic to."

But how does this even happen? How does it even occur to someone to not use the same ingredients every time when mass-producing food? And what circumstances lead them to have to change oils so frequently and unpredictably that they can't change labels at the same time?

Why is Google encouraging people to move away from Web and towards apps?

I was rather disappointed that Google is discontinuing iGoogle, but outright shocked that they're suggesting using a selection of apps to replace it.

I use iGoogle to get an at-a-glance overview of what has updated since I last checked. I can see the subject lines of any new emails in my inbox, the titles of new articles in my Google Reader, the headlines of news articles on topics for which I have google alerts set up, the current weather and whether there's a thunderstorm alert, plus a few fun things like word of the day and joke of the day and daily puppy. Checking whether anything needs my attention takes about 5 seconds and can be done anywhere with internet access (at home, at work, at a friend's or relative's house, and on my ipod anywhere where there's open wifi).

To do this without iGoogle, I'd have to log into Gmail and Google Reader separately, scroll through Google Reader (and mark anything I wanted to read later as unread), get my news alerts delivered to my email and open each email separately - it would probably take at least 5 minutes to verify whether there's anything that needs my attention.

Using apps would not only be less effective, but it would also be detrimental to Google's primary mandate of indexing and making accessible the world's information because, as I've blogged about before, information contained in apps is ungoogleable. It seems to me that goggle would want information to be on the web and accessed through browsers, because then it can be indexed and searched. Information on a website accessible through a browser can easily be accessed by people with mobile devices, but information in an app is in a silo and can only be accessed by people with specific devices.

I can't imagine what Google is thinking with this decision. It seems like blind trend-following, and I can't see any benefit to them or to us.

Journalism wanted: who are these people who throw plastic bags away and what are their motivations?

People who are opposed to plastic bags claim two different problems:

1. They fill up landfills.
2. They litter the streets.

Both these alleged problems baffle me, because I cannot fathom how they could possibly happen in any appreciable quantities.

1. Everyone I know uses their plastic shopping bags as garbage bags, or to clean up after their pets. If they didn't use plastic shopping bags for this purpose, they'd have to purchase garbage bags for the same purpose, and the total amount of plastic that ends up in the landfill would be the same. (Some people have stopped getting plastic shopping bags since they introduced the five cent fee, but they buy plastic garbage bags instead so the total landfill plastic they are generating is still the same.)

But since people keep complaining about plastic bags in landfills, that would suggest that a significant number of people are bringing their purchases home in plastic bags, throwing the bags straight into the garbage, and presumably buying separate garbage bags for garbage and to clean up after their pets.

Who are these people? Why do they do it this way? Why do they not find plastic shopping bags suitable for their garbage and pet clean-up needs?

2. When you have a plastic shopping bag, it's because you've just purchased something and need a bag in which to carry it home. You need your plastic shopping bag the entire time you are outdoors, because it is being used to carry your purchase. Your need for the plastic bag doesn't stop until you get home. So how on earth does a plastic bag turn into litter?

I understand how litter happens - you cease to need one of the things you are carrying for whatever reason, it's more trouble than it's worth to carry a specific thing around until you encounter an appropriate receptacle. But I cannot picture any situation in which this might happen with a plastic bag. I cannot envision how you might cease to need the plastic bag that contains your shopping. Throwing a plastic bag on the ground makes as much sense as emptying your purse of its contents and throwing the purse on the ground. That just...doesn't happen.

But enough people to reach my ears are complaining about plastic bags being litter. So who are these people littering with plastic bags, and what kind of situations are they in that they're carrying a plastic bag but don't need it? Or does this mean our landfills don't work?

I'd really like to see some actual answers from the people who do these things, because I just cannot picture how they happen. It would also be interesting to know what percentage of the population does these things.

What do urban planners do in the private sector, and why is this even an option?

From an article about why urban planners apparently don't want to work in Toronto:

He calls his interview in Toronto a “positive experience;” even so, he was smart to go back to Lotusland, where he works as a planner in the private sector, and as president of the Council for Canadian Urbanism.

and:

Councillor Adam Vaughan (Trinity-Spadina), a noted planning wonk, says Toronto’s lack of investment in its planning department turns off applicants.

“Every good young planner jumps ship because it’s better pay, better hours and more respect from clients if they work in the private sector.”

What on earth do urban planners do in the private sector? Why and how does private sector urban planning even exist? How can a private company plan a city? Doesn't urban planning inherently need to be done by the people with jurisdiction over planning the city?

It seems to me that private-sector urban planning would be analogous to a company whose business model is to barge in and tell people how they should renovate their houses. But, since these things exist, clearly I'm missing something. Can anyone explain to me why and how private-sector urban planning exists?

Why does textspeak still exist?

My cellphone is five years old, and it still has predictive text (T9). Today's phones are equipped with full keyboards and autocorrect, which is even better. These technologies both make it easier to write real words than to write fake words. If you type a real word, it will guess the word for you and you don't even always have to type all the letters. But if you want to type a fake word, you have to teach the device the word.

More and more communications are being typed on phones as opposed to keyboards, which means that more and more communications are being written with a device that makes it easier to type a real word than a fake word.

So what's up with people who still use textspeak for everything?

I know that sometimes you need to shorten things to keep it under 140 characters for platforms like twitter or SMS, but on sites like Failbook or Damn You Autocorrect I keep seeing people who are using textspeak systematically, for everything, even on platforms that don't have a character limit.

Why are they putting in all the extra effort?

Why are we resistant to the idea that we might have privilege?

Reading Scalzi's Lowest Difficulty Setting and the follow-up got me thinking. People are generally quite resistant to the idea that they have any sort of privilege. Their (and my) automatic, knee-jerk response tends to be "What? No I don't!"

But why is this?

I can tell you why I'm resistant to it. I'm resistant to it because for the vast majority of my life I was being given the message that I'm lucky about and should be thankful for things I didn't care about, many of which I didn't even like. For example, my parents would take us on stressfully long family vacations - whole summers lost to fighting off carsickness while having zero privacy - and tell me that I should be grateful that I get to travel. When we were travelling, my parents tried to save money by never eating at restaurants, instead taking us to a supermarket and telling us to pick out what we wanted to eat for dinner. But we never had a fridge or a stove or a microwave (and often not even a kettle), or even dishes or utensils. I'd ask if we can go to a restaurant because I'd been yearning for days for a nice big salad and a steaming plate of pasta, and they'd tell me I should be thankful we have food at all. My father went through this phase where he calculated that if they hadn't had kids they could drive a Mercedes instead of a Honda so he told us that we should be thankful they made that sacrifice and decided to have us. But, on top of the fact that I'm intrinsically nihilistic, this was during the worst of my bullying; I, and everyone else involved, would have been far happier if they'd gone for the Mercedes instead. (Even now, if I hadn't been born I obviously wouldn't be around to care, and I seriously doubt my parents would be postmenopausally regretting not having an overly-introverted, socially-awkward daughter with a non-lucrative career path and a lifestyle that rejects their values.)

So, because of all this, any sort of hint or insinuation that I have some sort of privilege or advantage or some other thing I should be thankful for evokes this feeling of all this stressful shit that I didn't even want to deal with in the first place piling up my tetris blocks and if they'd just left me alone I could go be alone in my room with a book and be much happier.

But these are all my own personal neuroses, stemming directly from specific feelings and experiences in my own life. None of this is broadly applicable to the general population.

So where's it coming from for everyone else?

Plot hole in my childhood

All too often, my parents dragged us along to do boring grownup stuff like shop for new windows for the house or pick out appliances. There was nothing for us to do - we wouldn't have known how to participate even if we'd wanted to - so we just had to stand around for hours and hours while they had boring conversations we didn't understand about stuff we didn't care about.

So why didn't they tell us to bring a book?

You've got two kids who don't get along with each other, being dragged along for time-consuming boring grownup stuff, both of whom are voracious readers. We would have been quite content to sit quietly and read. In fact, the reason why I resented being dragged along so much is because I really just wanted to be alone in my room with a book.

What is gained by having your kids be bored rather than quietly amused?

Recommendations

I'm filling out a customer satisfaction for a grocery store, and it asks me how likely I am to recommend the store to family or friends.  And, of course, the answer is "highly unlikely".  Not because there's anything wrong with the store, but because why would I recommend a grocery store?  I go there because they're near me and sell groceries.  If you're nearby, I'll say "That's where the nearest grocery store is."  If you're not nearby, I'll assume you want to go to one of the multiple comparable stores that's closer to you.

A website that sells undergarments contains very detailed descriptions of its bras, and solicits user reviews. The reviews include a checkbox for whether you'd recommend that bra to others.  But why would I recommend a bra to others?  Even if it works fantastically for me, that's meaningless to other people.  It's such a person item that I would never presume that my experience is in any way applicable to others, or vice versa.

This is something I've been noticing an awful lot lately - reviews and feedback asking you if you'd recommend the thing in question to others, without any regard for whether recommending that genre of thing is even appropriate or relevant.  What's up with that?

How does the Crown have access to people's mental health diagnoses?

A series of cases occupying the country’s highest courts has cast a spotlight on Crown attempts to probe the personal backgrounds of prospective jurors, potentially undermining the sanctity of the jury system.

[...]

The most contentious case involves a 2007 murder trial in Barrie, Ont., where the Crown was privy to private, background information about the mental health, age and driving records of many of the 280 citizens in the jury pool.  

Important question: how did the Crown come about information about people's mental health? That's medical records.  Does the Crown also know that I have GERD?  Does it know that I had strep throat at xmas?

And here's why everyone should be worried about it, even people who have never sought mental health care: in my experience with mental health care, I didn't just talk to my mental health care provider about the specific issues that are in the DSM.  I also talked to them about my parents' personality traits and my partner's sexual proclivities and the pros and cons of being friends with my friends.  So if mental health information is somehow available to the Crown, any information about your interpersonal relationships with anyone you might know who has sought mental health care should logically be available by the same means.

Why would you throw puppies in the garbage, even if you are cruel and heartless?

In the news today, some guy put a bunch of puppies in a suitcase and threw them in the garbage. (Happy ending, adorable pictures.)

I don't understand why a person would do this. And by that I don't mean that I can't imagine being cruel to puppies (although that's true too). What I mean is, even if you take disrespect or hatred for puppies as a given, I don't understand why you'd do it this particular way.

If you're too lazy to take them to a proper shelter and don't care if the dogs survive, why not put them outside and close the door, leaving them to their own devices?

If you want to kill them, why not kill them? Why abandon them somewhere where you won't be able to get whatever pleasure killers get of watching them die yourself?

If, for whatever reason, it is important to you to throw them in the garbage, why go to all the trouble of putting them in a suitcase first? Putting six puppies in a suitcase sounds difficult.

If you're trying to avoid other people finding out that you're getting rid of puppies, why not let them loose? They might wander off or chase a squirrel or be picked up by someone who's in the market for a puppy, and end up somewhere where they can't be traced back to you. Or, if they do hang out near your home even though you've let them loose, you can claim that they could have come from anywhere and chased a squirrel over here, and you don't know anything about them.

Or, as my co-worker pointed out, why not post an ad on Craigslist saying "Puppies for sale"? People actually pay significant money for dogs!

Putting them in a suitcase in the garbage is a sub-optimal way of achieving whatever the goal of someone who would do that sort of thing might be.

Why would you want to spend advertising money to encourage people to pray anyway?

Recently in the news, TTC ads telling a (fictional) child of drug users that they should pray as a solution to their problems.

I have to assume that the people placing these ads think they're altruistic, because whether or not people pray have no possible impact on the advertisers or their church. They must think that praying will help people, so they're taking out these ads encouraging people to pray.

But people who are able to pray - which probably includes everyone for whom invoking Jesus would be effective - are already aware that prayer is an option. And those who aren't aware that prayer is an option (and are open to a new religion) wouldn't know how or why to pray.

Therefore, this ad doesn't tell anyone anything they don't already know, while not telling those who it wishes to take action how to take action.

Why would you spend money on that?

***

I also just noticed that the "child" in the ads is saying "Dear Jesus" and "Thank you for hearing my prayer". Which means that they're already praying! So the ad responds to a prayer by telling the kid to pray? That's a wee bit assholic.

Bad (and inconsiderate) condo sales strategy

There's a specific pre-construction condo I'm interested in. I recently received floor plans, but no prices. However, googling around for prices per square foot, I found unofficial information suggesting that the units I'm interested in will be out of my price range. So I mourned my condo and waited for official word.

On Thursday, I received an invitation from a broker whose list I'd signed up for to a VIP preview to be held today. I asked if he had prices, so I wouldn't waste both his time and mine on something I'm priced out of. He said the builder was releasing them at the VIP preview.

So this morning I set an alarm, put on make-up and nervously went off to a place I've never been before to make a major purchase that I've never made before.

I walked in, was handed a price list, and discovered I was priced out of the units I'm interested in.

That was a waste of time! Why on earth didn't they just release the prices with the floor plans so people who can't afford it are selected out? Who is served by making people who can't afford it come all the way in to the sales office and tie up the time and attention of brokers and sales reps before they can learn that they can't afford it?

This was especially annoying for me because, being a shy and awkward sort of person, I get very nervous about doing new things where I don't know what to expect, to the extent that I feel it in my bowels and my acne and my dreams. The two days' warning they gave me was enough time to spend being nervous, but not enough for the nerves to dissipate and for me to come to terms with what I may or may not have been about to do. So I spent the past two days carrying these nerves, having fretful and interrupted sleep, with my cystic acne and my digestive system in overdrive, and all this during the busiest time at work. The tetris lines kept piling up until I was jumpy like a shy puppy on a subway. And I could have been spared all that if they'd just released a price list with the floorplans!

My first thought was that this model is really inconsiderate to introverts, shy people, aspies, the socially awkward, bullying victims - anyone for whom going into a strange place likely to be staffed by slick strangers and not knowing what awaits you is an ordeal. So at first this blog post was going to be about how energetic, extroverted real estate people for whom going somewhere new and meeting new people and making big money deals is a fun adventure (because, if it weren't, they probably wouldn't have gone into real estate) are making it unduly difficult for the rest of us.

But, on top of that, it's also inconsiderate to anyone who works or has other specific obligations or already-made plans on Saturdays, anyone who needs to arrange childcare if they're going to go do something grownup like buy a condo, anyone who lives a significant commute away - basically anyone who doesn't keep their Saturday wide open or full of easily-cancellable plans.

So all these people have to go through the stress and inconvenience of being in a specific place in a specific time on very short notice not even to buy a condo, but just to find out whether or not they can afford it.

It serves no one to make people who simply do not have enough money and mortgage space come into the sales centre. It would be far more convenient for all involved to let those who can't afford it select themselves out. So why not do that? What can possibly be gained by forcing people to schlepp all the way to your location just to find out your prices?