Purple Stuff

FingertheBlog coming to you from Florida. I'm on vacation and I'm thawing out and loving every minute of it. I spent two productive days in NYC before coming down to Florida, and all I have to do in the next week and a half is drop some resumes and get a tan. I've played some tennis and have gone to the gym, and I'm reading a book...for FUN.

Yesterday I played basketball with my Dad and two FingertheBlog readers not related to me. It's true, they exist. On the way back from playing my Dad and I stopped off at the WalMart in Wellington, FL to pick up some groceries. If you've read some of my other posts you all know how much love I have for WalMart. So we're in the grocery section and we're getting some milk. Across from the milk is a huge display of McArthur Juice. From what I gather, McArthur is a low-cost beverage company that serves the Sam's Clubs and WalMarts of the world. So in this huge fridge-container display thing there are about 50 or so gallons of juice. And just so you understand, we're not talking about not-from-concentrate juice here. We're talking about "bug juice"/powdered sugar and water/knock-of-Kool Aid-juice. It's cheap and it's probably nasty.

I took this pic with my camera-phone.













Fruit Punch, Orange, Lemon, and Grape. Clearly we have winner here and his name is grape. One sad lonely gallon of grape drink. For the love of God, why is everyone jonesing for grape. All of these drinks are sweet, all are sugary, but why is grape the bestseller? I've had this conversation with people before, but I don't think I've ever heard an answer that I thought was satisfactory.

Is it a racial thing? Is it a socio-economic thing? I remember on Saturday in July a few years ago playing basketball at 20th and 2nd in Manhattan and this jacked, 6'6", black guy rolled up to the courts chugging grape soda from a 2-liter bottle. I thought that was pretty badass. I used to come to the courts with mini Poland Spring bottles that I'd take from my gym. I feel like if I came to the courts with my mid-calf socks, tucked in t-shirt, and a 2-liter bottle of grape soda I would be taken less than seriously. Why is the (perceived?) association of grape soda and minorities stronger than the association of grape soda and Caucasians? I'd like to think there is some sort of genetic explanation here, but I really don't know.

Dave Chappelle even takes it one step further by differentiating 'grape juice' and 'grape drink'. You can watch this Not-safe-for-work clip here.

I think we all have our grape soda stories, and I think it's fair to say that we all make our assumptions about grape soda. Let's put these assumptions to bed though. It's almost 2008 for crying out loud. We need answers. Someone call the Freakonomics guys.