Get myself a newspaper

I’m fixin’ to get myself a newspaper.

On my way to Atlanta one day last week I stopped at a convenience store in Dekalb County to get myself a copy of the Atlanta Journal Constitution so I would have something to read when I arrived at my appointment, where I knew I would be waiting for awhile.

Mainly I was just interested in the sports and the comics.
I gave the clerk a dollar and he deposited it in his cash register, looked up and said, “Will there be anything else, sir?”

“No, just my change,” I told him.

“There is no change, sir.”

“Yes there is. I gave you a dollar and you owe me a quarter back.”

“The paper cost a dollar, sir, it went up last Monday,” he told me with a look like he was wondering what cave I had been living in.

I mumbled a thanks and departed the place with my dollar paper, thinking the AJC certainly had a lot of nerve. First they reduce their number of employees, the scope and distribution of the paper, even the physical size of it, them raise their price by twenty-five percent!

Now what other business can you possibly think of which could reduce what they offered and raise their price at the same time? The government doesn’t count.

When I finally made it through all the traffic and arrived at my destination, I sat down to read my dollar paper. The front page had the same things I had seen on TV last night, but the sports section had some late scores I wanted to check on.

I also wanted to check on the comic strip character “Curtis” to see how he was faring now that school had started back.

Once I got through the sports and the comics, there wasn’t much left to interest me, and I wondered if it had been worth a dollar just to see if the Braves won in extra innings and if Curtis was in trouble at school yet?
A famous quote of the Late and Great Lewis Grizzard came to mind of what he had said when someone once complained about the newspaper:

“What do you expect for thirty-five cents?”

Well, not much, but for a dollar I did expect something more than what I got.

I heading back toward Jasper County now. When I arrive I intend to get myself a copy of The Monticello News and see what’s going on in the real world.

And I won’t be fixing to spend but fifty cents either.