This has nothing to do with local retail, but I thought it would be a fun chuckle for a Friday afternoon.

A New Orleans bakery owner recently took an extremely large order for 180 loaves of bread. As it turns out, they were to feed the elephants in the visiting Ringling Brothers Circus.

Owner Hillary Guttman's first thought was pretty much what I would think: " 'You can't get this from the grocery store?' But apparently elephants need bread with no preservatives."

You can read the full account here...

Depsite rumors to the contrary, Pizza Hut said this week that its name is still Pizza Hut.

Some people were speculating that the company's recent move toward pasta and other products might lead it to go with a simlified "The Hut" name and logo. In fact there are some stores that are testing signs that say "The Hut." If you want to see what that would look like, check out the photo with this Nation's Restaurant News story on the topic.

My favorite part of the story: "Niccol had said in earlier interviews that 'The Hut' also was simpler and easier for the 'texting generation' to use." Um.... LOL?

While I may be one of the best-known couponers locally, I thought some of you might enjoy this Miami Herald story about another coupon queen working her magic down in Florida. Ironically, her name is Susan, too... Hmmm...

This week, Upromise and Sallie Mae released a new study about college savings.

In it, 52 percent of the 1,200 parents surveyed said they are still saving the same amount for college, despite the economy. Parents also saud (92 percent of them) that they expect their children to pursue higher education, but only 48 percent said the plan to pay most of the costs.

With all that in mind, I figured I'd post the link to this new college savings tool from Sallie Mae.

I subscribe to an e-mail newsletter by Phil Lempert, who calls himself the Supermarket Guru. Phil talks about new things happening in stores and decisions being made that affect consumers. He also reviews new products.

In his lates newsletter there was a recipe for a $10 dinner called Chicken Tortilla bake. If you want to see it, you can find it here. But I thought I would ask you to share your favorite $10 meal. If you can share the whole recipe, that would be a plus!

For those of you who play video games, you may be interested to know that Wal-Mart is testing the waters of the used game market.

According to this story, select Wal-Mart stores in the Northeast are currently testing video game trade-in kiosks similar to the Redbox machines for DVDs. Wal-Mart's move echoes that of other retailers who are also exploring the opportunities in the used game business. If everything goes well, I would bet we see prices on used games drop as a result of the new competition.

The National Retail Federation has posted a very interesting question on its Facebook page: If you could ask the American consumer one question, what would it be?

I'm kind of curious myself, so I'm stealing the question for my blog.

So what would you ask?

The folks at Smart Money did an interesting comparison of the prices at BJ's, Costco and Sam's Club. They shopped for household staple items and found some pretty big differences in some cases. The stores they shopped were in New York, but I thought you all would still find the results interesting. Here's the link.... 

I thought this story from Nation's Restaurant News was interesting.... it basically says that kids are bypassing the kids meals and they toys in favor of items from the $1 menu. So I'm just curious. What do your kids order? 

Brandweek had a really interesting story recently about how food manufacturers are paying more attention to the "center of the store."

The middle aisles, where all the shelf-stable items like canned tomatoes and cereal are kept tend to be overlooked sometimes. But with more shoppers looking for budget-friendly items, all of the sudden those center aisles are looking more appealing.

If you want to read the story, you can find it here. ...