A better bag of chips - get rid of the bag

I am sick and tired of buying a bag of chips only to have them reduced to a bag of chip pieces and crumbs.

I am very fastidious about certain things -- how my clothes are folded, how my work is arranged on my desk, and the shape of my chips.

Normally, I buy tortilla chips to go with my favorite drip -- salsa. And when I shop I closely inspect the bags to determine whether the chips are pretty much whole or pretty much busted up.

When I go to the checkout line, the bag of chips is always -- always -- the last item on the belt, the hope being that they will be the last item to go into one of my shopping bags.

But they rarely make it home in the same shape they left the shelf. Some of the people who bag my groceries treat a bag of chips with the same disregard as they do a bag of frozen peas. Then there's the likelihood of a shifting load in the trunk on the twisty turny drive home, resulting in a squeezed bag of chips and breakage within.

I always come home with buyer's remorse. That bag of chips just doesn't look as good at home as it did in the store.

When I dive into a jar of salsa I want a full chip, not a piece of a chip, not a crumb of a chip.

I don't have that problem with my box of cereal. True it gets a little crumbly at the bottom of the box, but by and large I get bowl after bowl of good looking bran flakes from my Raisin Bran (the lack of raisins, however, is a rant for another day).

Might I suggest that chip makers start packaging their chips the same way that cereal makers package their cereal. I like the idea of having them protected by a layer of sealed wax paper then the box.

I don't care that it's probably less efficient, more expensive, and would be responsible for leaving a size 16 carbon footprint.

A man should be able to eat chips he pays for -- whole ones, not pieces.