For the past two months, I’ve worked near the Whole Foods in Gowanus, Brooklyn. It’s an easy lunch destination, with mostly overpriced, mediocre and healthy-ish options except for the buffalo chicken tenders, which are delicious, terrible for you, and cost like $6.
The problem is the tenders aren’t always in stock. Sometimes I’ll walk the two blocks or so, over a gross canal and past loud, odorous industrial sites, only to discover that they’re out of the tenders, or perhaps never even made any that day. When that happens, I’m left with two choices: the teriyaki chicken bowl, which is fine and costs $9.99, or building my own salad, which I always fuck up by adding too many disparate ingredients and it ends up costing like $16.
Hoping to avoid the sad surprise of a salad or teriyaki chicken bowl, I began looking for buffalo chicken tender-shaped pattern. Sure enough, one emerged: There were buffalo chicken tenders on consecutive Thursdays. The Whole Foods in Gowanus has daily specials, like half a rotisserie chicken and potatoes for $5 on Wednesdays, or eggplant parmigiana subs for $5 on Tuesday, so I thought to myself, “Maybe the buffalo chicken tenders are a secret weekly special that only I’ve noticed.”
I decided to test my theory on August 11 by politely asking the Whole Foods in Gowanus about it.
https://twitter.com/tcberman/status/763803069289226241
On August 15, I followed up with another polite tweet and some bad math (it’d only been four days, not five).
https://twitter.com/tcberman/status/765390544956784640
Then today, Thursday, September 7, over three weeks after my initial inquiry, I asked again.
https://twitter.com/tcberman/status/773547171283099648
The Whole Foods in Gowanus has not responded, which is suspicious because they had lots of buffalo chicken tenders today. Why won’t they go on the record about when exactly they have buffalo chicken tenders? We may never know.
