If I had been drinking something while walking back to my apartment last night, it almost certainly would have come shooting out of my nose when I walked past the next-door convenience store.

I hadn't noticed them before, even though I've been inside more than a dozen times. As I was walking back from picking up a styrofoam box of fried rice for RMB 4 from the little 24-hour restaurant across Ningxia Road, I happened to glance into the Buddies convenience store. Like I said, I go in there often to pick up a drink or snack, maybe a bottle of Suntory Amino drink, or a bag of candied walnuts (good for making nut cookies, but go light on the sugar). I guess I'd just always been too occupied to notice the posters on the column that rises to the ceiling in the middle of the store. These posters are close-ups of food, like the kind of poster you'd expect to find in a grocery store. That's pretty normal. What wasn't normal was the choice of food pictured on one of the posters:

Chocolate chips.

Heh, try to find those anywhere but the super-expensive City Supermarket, located under the awning of the Shanghai Portman Ritz-Carlton in the trendy Jing'ansi neighborhood.