Two Kids, Two Grocery Stores, and One Peach Salsa: A Logic Problem for Father's Day

Directions for Logic Problem (borrowed from the LSAT)

The question below is based on a brief premise and a set of rules. In answering the question, you might find it helpful to draw rough diagrams.

Premise: Dan forgot limes for the peach and poblano salsa he intends to make to liven up an otherwise blah halibut steak. The salsa is crap without lime juice. Dan's two children, ages 5 and 3, love going to one of two nearby grocery stores, Sudbury Farms and Whole Foods, when the sun is at 20 degrees Virgo and Saturn is moving towards Gemini. However, if the four of pentacles is in the first position of the Celtic cross, Dan's children despise going to these stores with every fiber of their stubborn little beings. Additionally, if the haruspex divines the elk entrails to spell favorable southeast winds, whatever the first child wants the second child will automatically decide he does not want.

Question: If Dan’s salsa is not going to be crap, what should Dan do?

Rules: Please keep in mind the following additional conditions:

1. Sudbury Farms on Boston Post Road has a number of shopping carts the size of yachts. Approximately half of them resemble police cruisers, while the other half resemble fire trucks. While Dan likes having any excuse to immobilize his children, and Dan's children generally like pretending they are first responders, on odd numbered days child A prefers to be a police officer, while child B likes to be a fireman. About 25 percent of the time when child A and child B get into a heated dispute over which type of first responder they prefer to imitate, Dan marches them right back to the car.

2. Whole Foods on Boston Post Road at one time featured a single shopping cart in the form of a fire truck. Assuming the total number of children at Whole Foods wishing to imitate firemen on a summer Tuesday at 4 p.m. to be 20, Dan's children had about a 10 percent chance of securing the sole fire truck shopping cart. Dan's children therefore used to greet the prospect of going to Whole Foods on Boston Post Road with a mixture of anticipation and dread, owing to their conflicted associations with the place, deriving from the ratio of the total number of times they secured the single fire truck shopping cart to the total number of times they did not. However, at some point in the last year, the fire truck shopping cart "broke an axle" and Whole Foods has been slow about replacing it. Dan’s children haven't fixed on a single response to the absence of the fire truck shopping cart. Instead, their range of responses is wide and every response is vocalized in the Whole Foods parking lot at maximum volume.

3. Child A has been interested in the following books: Abe Lincoln Crosses a Creek [2], D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths [3], and a random history textbook Dan and his wife found at a library book sale, called A Message of Ancient Days [4]. Child B likes Sally Goes to the Beach [5], a pamphlet guide to Connecticut wineries Dan and his wife got at a rest stop on I-84, and A, Alligators All Around [6] by Maurice Sendak. There is no knowing whether the gaunt checkout clerk at Whole Foods will like being called "Abe Lincoln" for the tenth time this week; similarly, the clerk with the dreadlocks at Sudbury Farms may or may not like having two smiling and guffawing children call her "Medusa." However Dan thinks the gaunt clerk was a college student and has gone home for the summer, and the dreadlocked clerk never works the express lane.

4. Child B has developed the habit of demanding to be taken to the bathroom upon entry to any public space, even though Child B already peed and pooped at home just minutes before. Child A hates the smell of public bathrooms and complains vociferously whenever Dan escorts both children into any bathroom. The bathroom at Sudbury farms has a faint cinnamon smell given off by those white disks in the urinals activated when people pee on them. The bathroom at Whole Foods smells like whatever bodily function was last undertaken in that bathroom. Child A tends to prefer, i.e., despise less, the smell of urine-activated cinnamon thingies to the lingering scent of strangers' bodily processes. However, the bathroom at Whole Foods, discreetly located behind the fish counter, is a "single," and any person with young children knows the glory of finding a lockable, private bathroom in a grocery store.

5. Dan and his wife insist that their children have a diet consistent with Dan and his wife's social class and education level. Therefore, foods Dan gorged on in his own childhood—peanut butter Twix Bars, gummy worms, Stouffer's French bread pizzas—are not allowed in Dan’s household. Dan's children receive approximately 22 minutes of exposure every week to children from other social classes, who invariably eat the verboten foods in their presence. Sudbury Farms displays same verboten foods prominently. The more class-appropriate kid foods—Bell and Evans chicken nuggets, Veggie Booty, Nature's Path "gorilla munch" cereal—are harder to locate than they are in Whole Foods. Once located, though, they’re cheaper.

6. Dan suspects that it is technically illegal, even on a quite cool early-summer afternoon, even for just one quick little in-and-out, to leave his children playing happily in their car seats, in the car, in the parking lot, even if he'll be right back and will bring Child A a corn muffin and child B a blackberry scone. However, Dan has, in the past, done things that were technically illegal, especially during his senior year at a small liberal arts college while sitting around with his friends watching Bergman's film The Seventh Seal [7] and eating a carton of Ben & Jerry's ice cream. It didn't seem to cause harm then, though one of his male friends did appear to grow quite voluptuous breasts in the mid-’90s. Dan's children, if fortified by a muffin and a scone, might prefer to be left for just a minute in the car while Dan darts in to the store. Whole Foods has a hidden side parking area, over by the fair trade garden rakes and work gloves. Dan's car has rear tinted windows.

So, what should Dan do?

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Photograph of man pushing shopping cart from Digital Vision/Getty Images.