The first step is a doozy

I am often bothered by the cost of shipping for orders, especially on smaller orders, since a single bottle can carry a shipping cost around $7 or more, depending on distance to customer. Of course, my figures I am about to mention are not adjusted for the coming rate increase from the post office, and is the rate for them to be shipped to where I live, the same town they would be shipped from, so it is really the minimum values for the test item, but....

USPS standard shipping (to the same town I ship from)

1 bottle $6.61
2 bottles $6.61
3 bottles $7.01
4 bottles $7.38
5 bottles $7.71
10 bottles $8.63
25 bottles $10.37

Now, being fair, the store offers free standard shipping once you hit $100, most likely one would hit that before they hit 25 bottles. (With some being upwards of $10, and some much higher due in tomorrow, it might only be a few bottles to hit that point, but with mini bottles, it could take a whole lot more.)

The point is, rather, that the first bottle is the most expensive to ship, one bottle in this demo is about $7 to ship, but less than 90 cents per bottle when 10 are bought at the same time. For fun, I looked up the cost to ship 250 bottles, and came up with $63.08. Now, granted, if someone ordered that and it was only going across town, it would be that, elsewhere would be a bit more. Still, assuming free shipping had not been triggered, that is around 25 cents per bottle. Talk about economy of scale.

Never call a sauce wimpy by its smell

Someone once introduced me to smelling a hot sauce before tasting it to determine it's heat. Fair enough, I figured, and it seemed to work rather well.

That opinion changed last Friday as I tried the newest bottle to go into the diaper bag I carry around, Mad Dog 357 Ghost Pepper Hot Sauce. No smell. I barely could smell the base of it.

Now, in my head, I have a few things running around. I buy from my site at the retail cost, and I began to worry that I had a hot sauce that was very overpriced. (Another person I once met explained that price and heat are often related, because it cost a lot to refine the peppers to make the higher heats. Logical, but the package also has something to do with it.) Now, I know that having a few of the 'generic' Louisiana style hot sauces is normal, and they do have some range in flavor and color, from the classic Tabasco to the orangeish yellow packets from Skyline. (It looks more red in their bottles than in the packets, but I have heard from an employee of Skyline that thiers is a private lable Tabasco product.)

Back to the matter at hand, I had just poured some of this minimally smelling beast onto the ketchup (I like my ketchup hot) and realized I hadn't put some onto a fry to taste it straight out, so I lightly dipped the fry into the hotsauce, careful not to get some of the ketchup with it. The next moment I will remember for some time, as I ate the fry I felt the heat. It seemed a little slow, but it was there. I realized I was going to need a drink if I kept eating my fries. By the time I was done with my fries, my eyes were watering, and I was sweating. Now, keep in mind, that I often eat between 12 and 24 of the blazing wings from BW3, and I don't tend to think anything of doing such. As long as I am not tired, which causes me to rub my eyes, I am fine. (Hot sauce in the eyes is not pleasent.)

I still have trouble believing that a sauce had that effect on me. I dare question what would happen to someone less tolerent of the heat. For once, I truly understood the story about how Dave's had a sauce banned from a show. I can easily see someone buying it for the shiney bottle, who can barely tolerate Tobasco, and getting a big drop in their mouth. Of course, I know my tolerance will build with this one as well, but I do enjoy the anomoly of the smell on this thick sauce.