Veran's odd approach to chicken (1)

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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23 January

So it seems to me - and, no (following Every Veran helps), I am not always shopping there, just that there is nowhere else (near) to do so after midnight on a Sunday night!

I have bought a pack (in fact, two packs) of chicken nuggets (or pieces, or dippers - some agglutinations, at any rate, in breadcrumbs of fragments left over from whatever gruesome process of 'waste not, want not' our modern food ('food'?) nowadays goes through), and that is just my point:

For I am boldly told that I am purchasing exactly twenty-three of these chicken bites, when I could have sworn that twenty-four was more usual.

At the same time, most bottles of beer (in Veran) are up tenpence (to £1.99, and may be 550ml, or just 500ml - in either case, not a full pint), and the cat, thinking herself addicted to milk with a special formulation for her kind, may have to forgo it, as, even with the better way of buying it (as a three, rather than individual little bottles), it is still 20% more in price than a fortnight ago.

And yet shoppers will, maybe, prove easily spooked by other things than price - being told that my frozen pack of baby kievs contains 15 may seem fine, whereas 19 (one short of a favoured multiple of 10) might not: I stress that I have not seen that product advertised in that quantity, but it does not inconceivable, when I have just bought one short of two dozen of these nuggets (well, with both backs, 46).

Will the packs of sausage rolls (to cook from frozen) be following suit? - or have they already done so? And if enough consumers do react badly to odd numbers (or certain ones), as against even ones, why would that be?

Is some bias or prejudice built into our numerological world-view, as, surely, even the roulette tables ask us to bet on the difference? And an odd whole number, when squared (or cubed), stubbornly preserves its oddness...


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