I have almost certainly mentioned before that I typically weigh or measure the food I eat, because I have way too much data on what happens when I wing it. I'm quite sure I've said before that I don't mind high quality food, but I'm much rather have unlimited piles of mediocre food and dainty portions of the finest cuisine. That's just true, period.

So anyway: We'd been searching for quite a while to replace the two food scales we keep in our kitchen, which were of the same type and gave out within perhaps a month of each other after long years of operation.

First I went to Wal-Mart, and what we bought were cheap but unreliable. The closest one is 20 miles away, and I had to make the trip twice. Oh well.

Last weekend, we went to Target, and I finally broke down and spent $35 for one. Then we stopped in at Bed Bath and Beyond across the parking lot and they had a scale for $20; the only downside, strictly aesthetic, was that the cheaper one is being marketed with "The Biggest Loser" logo. I held my nose, bought that too, and decided to try them both. 

It wasn't until I got home that I realized I'd bought essentially the same scale: Same company, using housings that are colored slightly differently; one has the logo, the other has the 75-percent-higher price. They performed the same, though I noted they both differed from our current scale by two-tenths of an ounce at fairly low weights.

Whatever — I need an external measurer, not complete accuracy. Was I going to hire a standards laboratory to tell me which one was "really" accurate?

So I returned the scale to Target, and bought a second one at BB&B — we like having two out in our football-field-sized kitchen. I asked the BB&B manager why the one with a logo, which I would expect to add promotional cost, compared to the un-TV-branded model, was so much cheaper. He said that BB&B just has lower prices. 

Well, I did ask.