Every time a customer purchases products with the ShopRite Partners In Caring shelf tag, they support the brands that support the fight against hunger. At ShopRite, customers are not just filling a grocery bag; they are helping to fill empty bowls for thousands of hungry families in your community.

ShopRite Partners In Caring is the Recipient of the Following Awards – among others:

• Good Neighbor Award – Food Marketing Institute (FMI)
• Retailer of the Year Award – America’s Second Harvest/Feeding America
• Outstanding Achievement Award – Hudson Valley Food Bank
• Crystal Toque Award – Philadelphia and South Jersey
• Outstanding Spirit Award – Monmouth and Ocean County Food Bank
• Connecticut Food Bank – Bill Liddell Award
• Corporate Excellence Award – Food Bank for New York City

Companies that have joined ShopRite in the fight against hunger are marked in stores with the ShopRite Partners In Caring shelf label. By choosing these products, ShopRite customers support manufacturers who contribute to the program.

Each of the 217 ShopRite stores in the six states that ShopRite serves (New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Maryland) selects qualified local organizations to benefit from the program. These local food charities use their designated funds to acquire supplies at a food bank.

Today, the ShopRite Partners In Caring program supports 23 regional food banks and more than 1,400 charitable agencies with food or meal components. With a $2 million annual donation, more than $20 million has been donated since 1999 in the fight against hunger.

For more on the program, visit www.ShopRitePartnersInCaring.org.

Time was when work-study meant taking shifts at the campus commons, wearing a paper hat and serving mystery meat and creamed spinach as your classmates shuffled through. But with dining services mostly outsourced, and everything about college life more complex, work-study jobs have come to fill a variety of needs — beyond the obvious one of putting cash in the pockets of undergraduate and graduate students. Some want to develop a skill, or beef up a résumé. Some seek an “in” with a certain professor. Ms. Rice’s goal was to make as small a dent in study time as possible.

Back in the day when I was applying for financial aid, my college would send back a list of different funding sources that I was eligible for given a variety of factors. Federal work study was always listed, but the options put before me in the program weren’t as meager as paper hats and mystery meat. That said, I did find the options presented to me unacceptable when I was in college. They were the typical, BS jobs like sitting at the front of the dorms and signing guests and working as tellers at the various cash registers around campus.

Plus, the rates they were willing to pay were abysmal. Something like $5 per hour (I think one job was even at $4.50 per hour). I know it was 2000 when these options were presented, but come on! Instead of these ridiculously low, modern-day-slave labor rates, I went out and worked at a large pharmacy and grocery store making over $10 per hour. From there I went on to work for a creepy, deceit-laden real estate development company making even more.

How are students expected to pay for college when they are given such unacceptable federal work study options? Here’s hoping that they’ve changed the types of jobs that are available to the students so they can at least make some decent money in this program.

I remember growing up in Morris County when we would get massive snow storms where you would be snowed in for a few days. Since I’ve been down in eastern Monmouth County (almost 10 years now) we’ve only been snowed in for a prolonged period of time once. Heck, they get more snow out in Las Vegas than we get in eastern Monmouth County! Okay, maybe that’s a stretch…

One of my roommates works for Wegmans grocery store and he was saying how people were stocking up on all different types of groceries yesterday in anticipation of the coming snow storm. What folly! Folks, we live in eastern Monmouth County – we’re too close to the shore to have any significant, long lasting snowfall. Plus, most of the population in this area drive gigantic sport utility vehicles so you shouldn’t have many problems getting stuck in the snow!

But anyway, everyone be prepared because here comes another “storm of the Century!” Or at least a dusting of snow that scares the locals once again…

In a season that inspires earnest letters about toys, one notable batch is being sent not by kids to Santa’s workshop but by parents to the executive suites of real-world toy makers.

The message: Please, in these days of economic angst, cut back on marketing your products directly to our children.

The letter-writing initiative was launched by the Boston-based Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which says roughly 1,400 of its members and supporters have contacted 24 leading toy companies and retailers to express concern about ads aimed at kids.

You have to admire the parents who would take out some time in their day to write these letters, but it makes me wonder what happened to old school parenting? What happened to a parent keeping an eye on what their children watch on television – including the commercials? And what happened to a parent telling their child, “No. You can only have one toy – not all five of them.”

I’m sure that the people who wrote these letters are fine parents and that they take good care of their children, but this just seems to me like a financially-strapped citizenry lashing out at anything around them. Why not go after those companies which put the impulse buy items at the front of the grocery store? I mean do you really need the candy bar or the deck of playing cards that are wedged up above the conveyor belt? Of course not, but they’re there for you to look at as you pay.

Better yet, why not sue all of the major retailers who have now rearranged their stores so that you cannot get to the items that you really came for unless you walk through the entire building? Look at Wal-Mart – they have all of their electronics and the toy department in the back of their stores now. What if you just want to come in and buy a DVD? You’d be subjected to advertisements on your entire way through the store and on your way out.

It goes on and on. Writing these letters was a valiant effort by these parents, but probably an activity that would have been more useful if they just sat down and educated their children on how to read and react to various advertisements.

In the mean time, check out New Jersey Carpet Cleaning for the best carpet cleaning in the Garden State!