The Reason We Were Shopping Shopping

I pushed an artificial grocery cart: a gray plastic replicate that looked like it had been molded and assembled through an off-planet 3D printer. Real metal wire grocery carts, the kind I remember chasing across the Red Owl parking lot during my first time-card job as a bag boy, always had one wheel that had a distinctive limp: duh-dump, duh-dump, duh-dump.

This grocery cart was unnaturally silent, gliding, not rolling, along the aisles of the big beautiful new Festival Foods store with wide aisles, good lighting, clean cases and bright-eyed and helpful staff stocking, prepping and polishing. As we passed them, they looked at my wife and I with some curiosity since an hour into the grocery trip, our cart replicate was still empty. “Can we help you find something?” they asked. We smiled, “No, we are fine.”

We had a list, talked about items on the shelves, pulled some out to look at cost/ounce but did not put them in our cart. We were grocery store shopping shopping. The Wednesday afternoon tour seemed like a retired-couple joke with the punch line of finding Metamucil in aisle thirteen. The reason we were shopping shopping was our previous store of more than 20-years had been sold to a chain from the Valley. During the six month remodeling and transition, we stuck with the same old store, same old staff, but different generic labels in good humor. We are loyal but do have limits.

When we couldn’t find an item that was always next to the pimentos, top shelf aisle six, we rationalized, “They’ll have it next week.” But a number of favorite food items ran out and did not return. Each week more and more items could not be found. One time, it even took two long-time clerks to discover where the molasses had been tucked away. Finally, when the local bank’s ATM was pulled and replaced with a sad looking fee-based machine that you find in discount liquor stores, we decided it time to go elsewhere.

“Where is the shredded cheese?” my wife asked, looking at her grocery list template organized by the aisles of our old store. There were 12-ounce tubs of shredded Parmesan in the artesian cheese section in front of us, but not the wide selection of blue-labeled Kraft brands hanging vertically from hooks. In the old store, they were just past the dairy section. They would be here too, if we could find the dairy section.

Two hours later, our hover-cart was empty though our shopping list note was filled with scratch-outs, additions and corrections. I think some of the staff were assigned to follow us. Aisle numbers were penciled in on our grocery list template according to the layout of the new store. Once we were home, the notes would be cut and pasted into a new list according to our most common purchases and the movement through aisles of the new store. Did I mention we work well with lists?

Festival Foods has a well-polished produce and fruits section for those who like to eat fresh. Also notable are well-stocked and logically ordered ethnic food options, an artesian bakery, local wines and craft beers, a large deli and meat counter, and a very nice fresh seafood selection, which is not easy to maintain sitting between the two coasts. For busy families, they have cases upon cases of frozen pizza and for those who have the time, fresh pizza dough.

And they do have dairy, on the far, far wall.

Our only complaint, so far, is minor and peculiar to us. Coupon inserts are found in a rack as you enter the store, not in the local paper (millenials ask, “What's a local paper?”). You look at the insert to find items to buy, add them to your list, and then hand the insert to the cashier as you check out to get discounts. This is a very European method when families who have little storage space, shop for groceries every day and adjust their menus on the fly. One often sees loaves of French bread sticking out of recycled sacks on the Paris metro.

That’s not us as you might have guessed. We want good, reliable food selections, we like to prepare our meals together with fresh products, but we need to plan around a busy dual-schedule in advance. Far in advance of picking up coupons as we walk in. Grocery visits need to be fast, efficient and weekly. The hover cart is a bonus.