It takes negotiating, pleading and downright lying to get my kids to try new foods at home, but if a lady at Costco with plastic gloves offers them something they’ve never heard of in a cup and they get to eat it with a toothpick, all the sudden they’re Anthony Bourdain.

Me too. I love a free sample. Usually.

If you take the Metra train in Chicago you have no doubt noticed the wonderful new campaign by Degree for Women “Dare to Join Forces with Nature.” It’s lovely. It has beautiful flowers and open white spaces for elegant copy. Really top notch. And now it has the sample people.

Every morning when I get off the train there is a fresh faced young woman offering me a small packet of deodorant. I don’t want it. It’s deodorant. I already applied deodorant at home. In private.

In this era of public living, I want some things to remain private. I don’t seem to be able to do anything about the kid sitting next to me on the train with his headphones so loud they give me a headache. I can’t stop the woman behind me from talking at great volume and length on her cell phone about how she is going to redistribute her belongings from closet to closet this weekend to get ready for summer (this conversation took over 20 minutes and had so much detail that I find it hard to believe there was anyone on the other end of the phone). But when it comes to personal hygiene, I think we should all take a step back and reclaim some sense of modesty. Deodorant is now, and should always remain, a bastion of privacy.

Now, that being said, if the sample person was a 3-week-dirty, food-in-the beard, just-down-from-the-mountains, Grizzly Adams look alike with Chick-Fil-A on toothpicks, I would stand there chatting and eating all day.

Tags: Anthony Bourdain, Chick-Fil-A, Costco, Degree, free samples, Grizzly Adams, Nichole Flynn

This entry was posted on Monday, April 12th, 2010 at 8:42 pm and is filed under Mixed Nuts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.