Jude wrote:
>
> I really agree with the crostini suggestion. They go very
> wellw ith cheese, and that way your customers can one-stop
> shop: buy their wine, cheese AND something toeat it on, all
> in one stop on the way to the party! No need for crackers!

The local Whole Foods (and probably every store
in the chain) had been doing that. They'd thinly
slice the old bread, oil it with olive oil, toss it
with herbs, then bake.

This went well for a few years until they had a
bad batch. It wasn't baked nearly enough. They
were very soft, not even much like toast. That
batch sold poorly, and succeeding batches also
sold poorly. Apparently, someone in charge didn't
feel like throwing out the slow-moving batches,
so they were merely repackaged as they passed
their expiration date. I know some of them were
repackaged at least twice, so they were quite
stale and hard. I thought I was being careful
about avoiding those packages, but they caught me
once. That was the very last time I bought them.

The lesson to learn is always throw away the bad
batches. Don't ever repackage a stale batch,
because it will hurt sales of your good batches.
The local Whole Foods doesn't understand that.
They took a good technique for recycling old bread
into a tasty product, and they destroyed the local
market for that product through their own greed
and/or incompetence.