You Know You're Stable When...

You earn a free meal from a food establishment you frequent. Today, I earned a free sandwich meal from Vons. I felt proud. I have never earned a free sandwich meal before. It makes me feel a part of the community, that I have contributed enough to earn a free sandwich.

Now one of my secret lunch take-out spots in the Silverlake/Los Feliz area is no longer secret. The entire worldwide web knows the Vons deli on Sunset and Virgil is good. Several years ago Vons made a point of sprucing up their deli's. One of my fantasy career's is to own a deli at some point. Make some films, open a deli, then run for some local political office. I think that sounds good.

Anyhow, Vons deli sandwiches are tasty and reasonable. You can get a six inch for 4.99 or a twelve inch for 8.99. I've never ordered the twelve inch. The six inch is satisfying. There is a lot of meat in the sandwich.

I usually order the Primo Italian. It is on Italian rustic bread, garlic spread, olive spread, salami, ham, pepperochini, lettuce, and provolone cheese. I love olive spread on sandwiches.

They have a whole series of eight or nine specialty sanchwiches. The steak with grilled onions looks good.

If you order a sandwich, you can swipe your Vons card get credit for a sandwich. After you purchase seven sandwiches, you earn a free one. I like this because it does not require carrying around a little punch card that you always forget to hand the person. If you have a Vons card, it does it for you.

I usually get the meal with the sandwich. The meal costs $1 more and you can get a big soda and a bag of chips.

I often get a Vons sandwich before my Saturday shift at SPO to eat while I work. I get the meal because I figure I'll spend $1.25 at the vending machine anyway to get a drink at some point, so I save a quarter and get a free bag of chips.

My main complaint with the meal is the quality and selection of chip varieties. They only offer Doritos, plain Lays, and Cheetos in a medium/small bag. I get the Doritos. I wish they just had Salt and Vinegar, it does't seem unreasonable, especially if they already have the regular Lays.

The people who work at the counter are reasonable. I prefer to get a bottled 20 oz soda in lieu of the fountain drink, because I don't like to drink the soda right away and I prefer to keep the carbination. Luckily for me, the fountain drink has a history of being broken, so the counter folks have become accustomed to swapping out with the 20 oz bottles and they let get one if I so request, even if the soda machine works. If I am getting a sandwich and plan on eating it right away, however, I will get a fountain drink because I like the ice.

The counter people do not strike me as sandwich affectionados like myself. I have a similar when I talk with non-filmmaker friends about movies. They like movies, but don't care about them as much as I do. The Vons deli folks are not sandwich fanatics like the employees at Lucca's or Molanari, the two best Italian deli's in San Francisco.

But what impresses me is their training. Each Primo Italian is prepared exactly the same way by a series of different employees. They get the exact right ratio of pepperochini to olive spread to meat. Part of this is due to the system, whereby they have carefully allocated meat and cheese sizes/amounts to be prepared. Still, there is a tendency to try to add some personal flair to each sandwich being created. At Lucca on Chestnut in San Fran, each sandwich they prepare has it's own personality....but that is a family deli operated by masters. Vons has created a system where the sandwich is very good and trained a whole bunch of people to be able to make it identical. Vons is to capitalism as Lucca's is to feudalism.

I obviously like the sandwich, but I would like to tell a short story to emphasize how good the sandwich is: Two weeks ago, on my Saturday shift at SPO I was eating the sandwich and a fat guy came up to me and said, "Where did you get that, it looks like a damn good sandwich?"

On another tangent, there is also a Starbucks kiosk in the Vons in which one can win free coffee. I have only ordered two Starbucks in the time it took me to earn a free sandwich, but I think it is worth noting for films shoots and other such things when a lot of coffee is purchased.