Attention Metro Shoppers! Today's Special: Fresh Bagels... Err, Frozen!

Having darkened the doors of a Metro location for many years, it has come as quite a surprise to me that the company's own brand - Selection - which has been marketing fresh bakery products for decades under that name, and the Equality/Master Choice lines that preceded it, have taken to freezing their fresh product, and pretending that there is no difference.

When I inquired at a store - Metro's thriftier store operations - Food Basics, I was told that this is standard practice. Not just for Food Basics, but Metro as well.

Bags of 6 Selection bagels - a bakery product - arrives in a frozen food truck at all their stores.

Moreover, someone in head office arrived at this brainwave idea, and somehow, no one seems to notice the entirety of this brave, new wave in product development and advancement is reducing their selection bagels to a slimy, wet sponge product on the store shelves. Oh, sure! They do dry out inside the nicely moistened bag that has invariably gone from sub-zero and back to room temperature at least twice during it's product life cycle. Each time, the bag fills with the misty, bilge-watery mess as the plastic bag's interior fights with the warm air outside it, and the frozen air surface of the bagels fighting back.

Apparently, the developer of this "lets save a few cents and ship it with the Cap'n High Liner!" is probably one of those clowns that thinks everyone toasts their bagels. "Doesn't every body?" Even if they are the Z-grade, low priced product, it never seemed to enter his/her mind that perhaps, some people don't look forward to waking up in the morning to a plain, slime-covered, wet bagel with butter or cream cheese. The people in logistics could have told anyone at the meeting - if there ever was one where this was discussed as a new protocol - that the mere idea of freezing a fresh product is akin to taking something worth more as a fresh product, and magically transforming it to something infinitely less marketable. Anyone appreciating fresh bagels, Z-grade to pompously up-marketed grade, could tell you the same. If they wanted frozen bagels, they would go to the frozen food section, which is a place these frozen Selection bagels are never stocked.

No sir.

They put these frozen bagels in and amongst all the other fresh bakery products, early in the morning to be found the only product "drying out", as a competitive, alternative product.

It aint.

As an idea or money-saving process, it's dunder-headed. Its just the sort of thing the grocery manager at the Yonge/Eglington store would have dreamed up, surprising his store manager and his customers with a much welcoming sight of frosted, misty bagel bags, every morning thereafter!

And there is one aspect to it that smacks of the real genuine disingenuous of it. Never is the product advertised or discussed or labelled or marketed and manufactured as a frozen food product - which is what it now is.

Had anyone ever walked into a Metro and been overhead by me discussing this whatever-saving precedent it began its life as, I would have promptly and sufficiently left enough verbal excrement running down the collective necks of all those proffering it as a "win". Whatever the win it may seem to be, it is developed, resulted, and tabulated as a loser in anyone's mind, but a bean-counter. And if that is what Metro/Food Basics are stooping to, then let the fucking bean counters eat their own shit. Because wet bagels in soupy bags does not cut it!