4 Minor Flaws That Will Make Me Boycott a Store for Life

4 Be Loyal to Any Drive-Thru that Gives You Ketchup Without Asking

If there's one thing you'll never run out of, it's places to buy shitty fast food. It's so readily available, in fact, that Type II diabetes is actually easier to get than water in a lot of parts of the country. No matter how desolate and drought-stricken that small town in California may be, chances are there's at least a Subway nearby, if not a full-on oasis of truck stops and fast food restaurants.

Once you move on to more populated areas, your fast food options increase exponentially. So, how do you decide where to eat without buckling under the weight of a seemingly endless array of possibilities? Food preference? Stop being stupid, all of this shit tastes exactly the same. Besides, if you start getting all reverent over food quality, they'll start thinking they can get away with anything. That's precisely how In-N-Out Burger has managed to stay in business for so many years despite not having bacon on their menu.

So, no, you definitely don't want to let on that you find the food irresistible. Actually, make it a point to not find any fast food irresistible, just for the overall betterment of society in general. Instead, if you're looking to purge your circle of chain restaurant friends, pay attention to the little details. Like napkins, for example!

Anyone with a working knowledge of fast food knows that the only way to enjoy it without looking like the most disgusting degenerate on Earth is to do so with a stack of approximately 16 to 20 napkins (per item) nearby. If a drive-thru place forgets to give you napkins once, that's fine, it happens one time. But, if the fast food restaurant you frequent seems to have an ingrained, systematic policy of shorting you on clean-up gear, forcing you to ask every time, that's a problem. Shorting you on napkins intentionally is some cost-saving bullshit that should not be tolerated.

Still, even if you do find that one fast food place that routinely gives you napkins (or a straw), that really shouldn't be enough to identify them as your best or favorite option. Giving you those things is part of the unspoken agreement fast food restaurants have with their customer base. They should not be widely applauded for simply doing what they're supposed to do.

Instead, let ketchup do the deciding for you.

Depending on your age, you might remember a time not long ago when including ketchup packets with a fast food order was just the accepted law of the land. At least, if you ordered fries it was, which seems like a perfectly reasonable threshold to me. At some point, though, as more and more companies started exploring new and exciting means of saving money, the obligatory ketchup packet became a thing of the past, for the most part. Today, finding a restaurant that gives you everything you might possibly need to enjoy your deliciously life-threatening meal upfront without you asking is about as common as a legitimate UFO sighting.

In other words, it totally happens, it's just not the kind of thing you're going to hear a lot of chitter-chatter about, because we're talking about fucking ketchup, among other things. Still, at some point, you may in fact encounter that rare restaurant that ignores the bottom line in favor of making sure you're happy. If you do, reward their efforts with your loyalty while simultaneously hoping every other fast food restaurant that ever mistreated you falls victim to what I like to affectionately refer to as a "rat party" scandal.

It serves them right for not serving you right.

3 Buying Local Should Never Mean Smelling Like Patchouli

In the great debate about secondhand smoke, cigarettes get all of the press and attention, but for my money, no uninvited smoke scourge plagues this country quite like the smell of patchouli. If you can't place the scent by name, just think back to the last time you were in any room with a person wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt. Once you've retraced the unfortunate series of steps that led you to that predicament, thus assuring you don't wander down the same dark path again at some point in the future, think back to what that person smelled like.

That's patchouli. It basically smells like what being a Grateful Dead fan looks like, and people just burn that shit freely in public like that's a stink that doesn't stay with a person well after the actual smell has worn off. You don't want a person you know smelling you in that state, under any circumstances. If they do, no matter what you claim to the contrary, they will forever and always assume you're just a frustrated civilian who harbors secret dreams of sprouting a head full of white-boy dreadlocks and bothering the shit out of people with talk of Rastafarianism for the rest of your life.

That's not an image you want burned into people's minds when they think of you. So, what do you do? Avoid establishments that burn patchouli-scented incense, which is practically all of them? Sure, that's fine, but believe me when I tell you that rolling papers and pipe screens don't just buy themselves, especially in an emergency situation. Would it kill this planet to have one store where I can dip in and make a purchase of that nature without smelling like I know the guy who used to make all the acid in this country?

No, I can't, actually. On that front, it's a pointless argument. If you're a fan of elaborate "tobacco"-burning devices, you're going to smell like a dirty fucking hippie at some point. That doesn't mean patchouli can't help you narrow your shopping decisions a bit, though.

Every year, on whatever weekend falls closest to 4/20 (surprise!), the people of this country are pressured into supporting their local, independent record stores by way of an event called, fittingly enough, Record Store Day.

That's cool, but have you seen the prices at those places? Best Buy didn't run 95 percent of them out of business for nothing. Still, that's not a great thing, either, so you should totally lend a hand when you can by supporting some bullshit little store like that. Unfortunately (or fortunately, if you're looking for a good reason to keep buying all your music online), lots of these independent record stores just amount to head shops with a music section.

Yes, there's a dusty bin of used records and they can certainly get you a new release if you have the patience of a Tibetan monk and a robust enough bank account to support such an endeavor, but for the most part, it's just a place to buy stuff with which to smoke weed. Does this describe your local independent record store? If so, does it smell like patchouli in there? If so, fuck them and Record Store Day, buying music shouldn't involve sharing in some crust-ridden Sublime fan's terrible life choices.

2 Avoid Any Steakhouse that Doesn't Have A.1. Sauce

A few years back, former NBA player and world-record holder for the most unfortunate called timeout in the history of sports Chris Webber had a minor controversy on his hands. After ordering dinner with his wife at a high-end steakhouse, he was informed that, despite science proving the irresponsibility of this line of thinking a long time ago, this particular meat store did not carry A.1. Sauce.

Being a man of reason, Webber then asked if they wouldn't mind running out to grab some from a store that displays a little more sensitivity to the human condition. He was told this was not possible. It's at that point Webber did the only responsible thing a person can do in that situation -- he asked them to box his meal up so he could take it home and finish properly preparing it himself. To be specific, he went home, put a metric ton of God's condiment on that highfalutin steak, put it between two pieces of bread, and ate it like so many common sandwiches before it.

Of course, because we haven't had more important shit to worry about in decades now, this became huge news. Fans took sides, hashtags were created, angry words were exchanged on Twitter, TMZ got involved ... it was a whole production.

Now, in case you're wondering, there is definitely a right and wrong side here. Webber is right. Totally. If you're an American steakhouse (so not those Brazilian numbers where everyone runs around wielding sticks covered in meat), it is your Constitutional obligation to serve A.1. Sauce, whether the Constitution says anything about it or not.

Doing anything less is like serving nachos without jalapenos, and that's what monsters do. Advertising your establishment as a steakhouse and refusing to provide patrons with the most essential part of the experience is a bait-and-switch scheme of the highest order, and you shouldn't put up with it for one second.

If you're in a steakhouse that reveals itself to be too good for A.1., Chris Webber your way out of there, never to return. Also, just to be clear, I do mean A.1. specifically. I don't mean the chef's proprietary steak sauce blend, I don't mean some knockoff version in a similar bottle, and I definitely don't mean Heinz 57 or Worcestershire sauce. Every one of those things is how steak is broken. A.1. is how steak is done. Don't settle for anything less. Be Chris Webber.

1 You Are Too Good for Unnecessarily Long Lines

Listen, fuck a line. I don't mean every line, obviously, life can't be that easy. But the second you get the sense you're being made to stand in a line just for the sake of creating a line for people to see, go somewhere else. If you stand in line to get inside a club, you hate yourself, plain and simple. The only thing happening inside any nightclub that's actually worth standing in line for is drugs, and you can get those without wading through a sea of sweaty people and throbbing techno music, usually.

There is nothing that's worth putting up with a line that shouldn't exist. This is not the Soviet Union, we aren't short on a goddamn thing, including buildings where people can get drunk at payday loan prices.

Even the desire to be "seen" at the trendiest spot in town shouldn't be a motivator, because if you were a person that people gave a shit about seeing in public, you wouldn't be in that line.

In my opinion, the same line of thinking should apply when a new fast food restaurant or some otherwise common business pops up in an area where they haven't been before. Case in point, inexplicably, there has been nary a Dunkin' Donuts in Los Angeles for as long as I've been here, or at least not one close enough that I can get there with the requisite amount of hassle that such a trip should entail, which is absolutely none. There certainly isn't one every four blocks like in so many cities on the East Coast.

So, it's understandable that when news broke that the Double D, as no one calls it, was finally coming to town, people were more than a little excited.

That excitement reached a fever pitch when, out of the blue, one of the franchises opened way earlier than expected, right in my own neighborhood. As fired up as I was about the prospect of finally having the only doughnuts that matter in my own backyard, I knew immediately that my chances of actually getting my hands on one anytime soon are slim to none. Why? Because every single day since it's opened (over a month now), the scene in and around that Dunkin' Donuts has been, at minimum, this:

And sometimes this:

That uncomfortably excited gentleman is named Johnny Hoops, and he camped outside Dunkin' Donuts starting at 9:30 pm the night before it opened, just so he could be the first person in Santa Monica to eat at the second-largest coffee chain in the nation. Listen, I get it, those doughnuts are everything, but for fuck's sake, act like you've been there before, people. It's a Dunkin' Donuts. As near perfect as that place may be, there's not a single location in the country that warrants a 50-person-deep line at all hours of the night.

Don't get me wrong, I want an iced chocolate cake doughnut as badly as the next man, but not nearly as much as I want to not stand in your goddamn lines. At the end of the day, this is a huge corporate entity we're talking about. If anyone deserves the satisfaction of seeing you sleep on the street just to get your hands on their product less, I have no idea who it would be.

Six months from now there will be probably be three Dunkin' Donuts within stumbling drunk distance from your couch. When that day comes, you'll feel a lot better about yourself if you can look back on right now without seeing visions of you standing in a disaster-victim-worthy supply line just to get your hands on one of the most common doughnuts in all the world.

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