Diane - South Shore Ferret Care

Wow, it's been a very busy summer, thank goodness for ferret sitting
which connected great ferret folks and helped sustain our little
shelter.

In the middle of all the scooping and making soup, I noticed that the
local grocery store seemed to be out of the Libby's 100% canned pumpkin
that we occasionally add to our soup to help the ones with "the
poopies".

I chalked it up to being a seasonal thing, Spring and then all Summer
when I couldn't find it at any store anywhere, checked with others and
they couldn't find it either I first sent and email got a foolish "auto
reply" and decided to call.

At first I just acted like a regular consumer, the gal at Libby's was
polite but really had not clue.

I looked around some more, still no pumpkin. Heck, it's September,
October and Thanksgiving 'round the corner, there should be pumpkin,
right?

I tried using the baby sweet potato, but nothing really "binds" like
the great pumpkin.

I used my last "pumpkin ice cube" (yes, I have weird things in my
freezer downstairs, don't ever add anything in their to your soda,
you'll get a surprise) and called again, determined to find out why a
big company like Libby's wasn't stocking the shelves of the big
supermarkets in the Boston area.

After checking with some other shelters it seemed no pumpkin anywhere
in the US?

Now I was stumped, I called again, but went up to the parent company
Purina/Nestle (figures).

I worked my way through the voice mail system one region to another
until I finally heard a phone actually ring and a real live person
answered the phone, I kid you not, they had an accent and I'm not
talking south, mid-west or even English! Yep, I reached the public
relations department in Switzerland.

Can you just imagine me trying to describe to the nice person why I
needed to know why there was no pumpkin on the shelves at the grocery
store, that yes, it was sort of an "urgent" nature to keep my "um
ferrets regular". As you can guess, that didn't translate very well. I
went on to try and describe using words like "binding" "digestive" etc.
(Stop laughing, don't you do anything to get whatever your ferrets
need?)

After being put on hold several times, by George I think they finally
got it!

It was then that they explained that last year the flooding in the
midwest almost wiped out the crop and they processed all that they
could with what they could harvest. Some stores had extra until early
Spring/Summer and then they ran out.

The good news is that the new harvesting has been done for this year's
crop and Libby's 100% Pumpkin should be on the shelves beginning this
week.

So the GREAT PUMPKIN is back, let the binding begin!

Diane - South Shore Ferret Care

[Posted in FML 6827]