Dear Rachel,

I understand your request to patronize Air America‘s advertisers as a way to keep AAR on the air. However, AAR’s advertisers, quite frankly, suck. A slimy collection of ineffective and probably poisonous diet drugs, credit repair scams, tax debt scams, mortgage scams, on and on and on. Oh, and Bob Barker pushing a Ft. Lauderdale restaurant to a national audience.

As a loyal RMS listener I would be happy to give my business to AAR’s advertisers, but I’m not going to have anything to do with the current crop.

Sincerely,

Andrew Rich

Click to see the full strip

R. T., I’m looking at you.

I’m catching up on my backlog and have posted seven new Restaurant Reviews: California Pizza Kitchen, The Fish Hopper, Jeffrey’s Hamburgers, Mimi’s Cafe, Plaza Inn, Ralph Brennan’s Jazz Kitchen and Robin’s Restaurant. This brings me up to October 1st, with 22 more reviews to go. I know!

And the winner is: REI in the new Charleston Road shopping center in Mountain View. I’d purchased a Freestyle Tracer pedometer before the ToT race so I could measure my pace through the course; at home, the treadmill tells me how fast I’m going and how far I’ve gone, so I wanted something similar. The pedometer did its job, but the plastic clip broke off halfway through the race and I ended up having to hold it in my hand the rest of the way. I wanted to exchange it, but of course, I’d lost the receipt. However, I had joined the REI Co-op around the time I’d bought the pedometer so I hoped that the purchase would be recorded somewhere.

When we entered the store, I looked around for the “customer service” desk, usually one solitary register manned by the one person in the store who can accept returns or do exchanges. Not the case at REI; every register can do returns and every employee can process exchanges. The transaction was indeed linked to my Co-op membership and the only wait involved was the cashier waiting for me to grab a new pedometer from the rack for an instant exchange. Well done!

And the winner is: Longs Drugs in the Town & Country shopping center at Embarcadero and El Camino Real in Palo Alto. I popped in to pick up a couple of cold drinks while Jen was using the facilities–diet Coke for me and a Lipton green tea for Jen–and when I got up to the checkout line there was one (1) lane open and several people in line. Across the aisle at the photo counter, another employee and a manager were chatting with a customer. It didn’t appear to be about where to find maxi-pads or anything like that, just random non-Longs-related conversation. Meanwhile the one (1) checkout line is getting longer and longer, and of course the cashier seems to be the extra slow one.

Finally the people at the photo counter conclude their chat and the other employee came over to open another lane. By this time I had reached the register and would have been next, but the second guy picked up my two bottles and walked over to the other register. He rang up the diet Coke but had trouble with the green tea, saying “uh, this wasn’t supposed to be sold as a single.”

“It was in the cooler case with a lot of others,” I said.

He just stood there for a minute with a blank look, starting talking to the first cashier about something totally unrelated, and then punched in an override or something to ring up the tea, finally allowing me to pay and leave.

In reality the whole episode, from entering the store to paying and leaving, probably took no more than ten minutes. However, it was at least seven minutes more than it should have been.