Pancakes and Scanners

My friend, who lives in Indiana, and I like to meet in WI when it works and it worked last week. We shop antique stores and thrift shops. It’s hard to explain the joy we get from going from shop to shop. It’s great fun and great therapy (or does the therapy come from our rich conversations?)

We stay in hotels and eat breakfast at their breakfast bars. We are used to the eggs and sausages in warmers, bread and bagels next to a toaster, oatmeal in crock-pots next to cold cereal, and the waffle maker machine – which was a great invention but has been around awhile. This time, at the breakfast bar, there was something new…a pancake machine.

You press a button and plop goes the first blob of pancake batter onto the conveyor belt, then a second blob of batter is dropped and as the belt moves along they are cooked and within minutes out comes two hot and tasty pancakes! It was very fun to ooh and aah over this new machine.

Later that day we stopped at one of the largest grocery stores I’ve ever been in. We find what we are looking for and as we check out we experience another new technology…360-degre scanners. You simply unload your cart one item at a time, place it single file on the belt, and your items are automatically scanned and no one has to handle the merchandise (except for bagging it).

Who knew we’d discover not one, but two new-to-us modern technology devices in the southern Wisconsin town of Janesville.