Eggs and Bread Please. Can You Say Sonar? Good Looking Brown Cows. Home Again.

Amazon’s Grocery Play.  How Does This Happen?  Ag Illiterate.  Random Thoughts.

If you take the metropolitan area of Atlanta, it is very difficult to drive a mile in any direction and not see a Kroger or a Publix grocery store, not to mention Trader Joes, Fresh Market, Sprouts, Aldi, and Whole Foods.  Speaking of Whole Foods, they now have a parent company who a long time ago was only known for selling books online.  Amazon has now purchased Whole Foods for $14 billion and will leverage the stores to broaden their web business and boost online ordering.  Amazon’s thinking is that they just did not buy a grocery chain – they bought 431 upper-income, prime location distribution hubs for all of Amazon’s offerings.  Publix and Kroger have recently implemented “click and pick up” services at most of their stores but Amazon’s unprecedented forethought and technology should turn the grocery world upside down.

I have been on the bridge of both a Navy ship and cruise ship and had crew members explain the advanced technological tools at the disposal of the captain and crew.  Though I understood about 20% of what they were talking about, it was quite clear that the bridge of these vessels uses technology to run every aspect of navigation.  So….how, with all of this technology and collision avoidance electronics does a U.S. warship collide with another vessel?  Friday night, off the coast of Japan, the USS Fitzgerald, a U.S. Navy Destroyer, collided with a merchant container ship.  I realize that navigating a huge vessel is difficult in crowded seas, and that human error with no “air traffic control” sometimes happens, but I just can’t imagine, with all the available technology, how ships collide in the open sea.  It is bad enough that the ships collided in the first place with a tremendous amount of damage to the Navy ship, but last night divers found the bodies of seven USS Fitzgerald crew members in the flooded compartments of the ship.  Very sad.

Agriculture and food processing and distribution.  Not exactly top of mind for most people as they walk the aisles of a grocery store picking and choosing their food and drink of choice.  Agriculture and farming don’t always make it into the core curriculum of colleges around the world so is anyone surprised that 7% of ALL American adults, over 16 million people, do not know that chocolate milk is made from milk, cocoa, and sugar?  Many answered that chocolate milk comes from brown cows.  Maybe it is time for agriculture to be included in all school grades just to give us an understanding of harvest, distribution, packaging, and merchandising so at a minimum most of us know how food is grown and what it takes to get food to grocery stores. Just sayin’.

Random Thoughts – North Korea finally releases a U.S. citizen who was charged with taking down a political banner.  So nice of the North Koreans to send him back after he has been in a coma for over a year.  North Korea, your time is coming and it is going to be ugly.  We have not heard from Secretary of Defense, General Mattis, lately and for good reason. No one should be surprised when he orders airstrikes on this maniacal country.  Last night, after a poorly played first half, Atlanta United beat the Columbus Crew in front of another sold out Bobby Dodd Stadium.  The win and three points pushes United into sixth place with another match at D.C. United this Wednesday night.   The jury at the Bill Cosby trial, after a marathon of deliberation, could not come to agreement on a verdict.  Does the prosecution retry the case?  Father’s Day, in some aspect, can be dated back to the Middle Ages and the celebration of fatherhood was brought to America by the Spanish and Portuguese.  President Richard Nixon signed a proclamation in 1972 making Father’s day a permanent national holiday in the United States.  I wish a trip to Seattle was on my agenda.  Not to see the Seattle Sounders of Major League Soccer or the Seahawks of the NFL, but to take a look at the brand new Jimi Hendrix Park.  Hendrix, widely acclaimed to be the greatest rock guitarist of all time, died in 1970 at the age of 27.

Have a Funday Sunday and happy Father’s Day!!