PRISM and dumplings (Prosperity Dumplings)

Working in tech has certainly been interesting these past few weeks. With the recent news breaking about the NSA and their secret 'PRISM' initiative, it's impossible to get through a single day without reading about how our privacy is being invaded, our civil liberties disappearing one-by-one, blah blah blah. Yes. That shit is serious business, but today - I want to draw attention to something that might be an even greater injustice... something that shakes my world to the very core. After years of being my golden benchmark for taste and value, Prosperity Dumpling has delivered a metaphorical Falcon punch to my non-existent ovaries and has recently shifted to a 4 for $1 sales model. Utter BS if you ask me. Sure, you could say that this was an inevitable fate - after all, Vanessa's had already adopted this pricing structure for a few years now, Tasty Dumpling was always 5 for $1.25, and Lan Zhou's potstickers are 12 for $3. The dumplings at all of these places sell without issue, but for some reason Prosperity's change in price, at least to me, feels perverse and dirty.

Remember when Prosperity was good? Pepperidge Farm fucking remembers. Shit was so cash. No tourists, no waiting, no nonsense. You could walk in and walkout with a huge-ass order of 20 fresh as shit dumps and a beef pancake, no sweat. In and out in 5 minutes, max. Then people started posting about it on blogs (I'm being a hypocrite here... bite me), on Yelp, on Chowhound. Of course, following that - asshats from yore came running abound for this uber-cheap gem of a meatpocket shop, clogging up the small storefront, forming lines 10+ deep, spending minutes at the front indecisively changing their orders. Fuck all that noise. I think this price hike was the tipping point for me. I was already paying for a diminished experience - longer waits for the same exact food, but now that it costs the same/more than other places in the vicinity that on occasion can exceed their quality? Unless you can justifiably claim that your dumplings are now 25% improved... it just doesn't make sense to me to go there. I'm done.

Let's consider this in another light. Over the course of a year, I get dumplings once, maybe twice a week, 15 to 20 at a time. That means, I'm spending roughly $3.50 per weekend on dumplings, over the course of a year - $182. Before the price change, that would be 910 dumplings. After the price change... that would be 728 dumplings. Damn. Some of you will probably point out the fact that it's a trivial amount of money, that I don't normally pay for food during the week. Fuck you guys - 200 dumplings is 200 dumplings. And dumplings are life to me.



Am I mad at Prosperity for trying to make money? Not really. They're a player, and they have every right to up their prices - if people are willing to pay inflated rates, they'd be insanely stupid to neglect profit that's just sitting there. Do I think they sold out? Hell yeah I do. As much as we all want to drown in an orgy of bitches and make mad bank, in the end, you really gotta stay true and love your loyal clientele (read: not those dick weeds who come after looking at Yelp and take 10 minutes to decide they want $1 worth of dumplings). Where am I going with this? I don't know. Nothing I say will change their prices back. Nothing I say will keep the masses of asshats from crowding in line adding to the already unreasonable waits. Nothing I say will bring back the Prosperity Dumpling of old. I'm just annoyed is all.

tl;dr - I feel like two inalienable rights have been violated. Just like I want to keep my weird fetishes secret from the government, I want my dumplings to taste good and only cost 20 cents per. Shame on you Prosperity Dumpling. I expected this from Uncle Sam... but from you? It's like an old friend is pissing in my mouth when I'm sleeping. Or something.