I honestly enjoy shopping for groceries.
I usually shop off a list. True, my accuracy rate isn’t high; I bat around 80%. I’m more than willing to substitute generic chickpeas for garbanzo beans and iceberg lettuce for romaine. I’m also not too particular what kind of toothpaste I buy. I mean, really, how different can Aqua-Fresh be from the Giant Eagle brand?
But I draw the line at generic toilet paper.
With some products, quality matters.
I like looking at how items are displayed on the shelves. Most are heavily marketed and pleasing to the eye. I especially enjoy products with mascots such as Little Debbie, Uncle Ben, Tony the Tiger, Mr. Peanut, Captain Krunch, Charlie the Tuna, and Aunt Jemima. They seem like family. We should, however, have a moment of silence for the Frito Bandito. He last appeared on a package of corn chips in 1971 a few days before the Frito Bureau of Investigation deported him back to stereotypeville.
The price we pay for political correctness is large indeed.
Most of all I enjoy spying on my fellow shoppers despite this being a major breech in shopping etiquette. According to the unwritten rules of crowd behavior, we should all politely ignore each other. But how can you ignore those people who wagon train their carts, or the fastidious shoppers who fuss over each purchase while calling their significant others on their cell phones reporting the latest shopping outrage (‘But dear, they are all out of angel hair spaghetti!”)
Perhaps the most outlandish of all are the scooter people.
I have no idea when grocery stores started letting shoppers drive through the aisles, but it must be a recent phenomenon. The scooter people seemed to just appear one day. I can understand the store’s point of view; they were trying to impress the local community with their humanitarian efforts. Who can argue with attempts to assist the physically disabled?
It turns out that most of the shoppers who use the scooters are not physically disabled at all. They’re just too lazy to walk.
(And while I’m at it, I also have a problem with how the stores are organized. Why are eggs in the dairy department? They have nothing to do with milk or cows or cheese or yogurt or anything dairy. The only thing a hen has in common with a cow is that both live on a farm, and with big agri-business taking over the food industry even that is a question mark.)
My infatuation with grocery stores emerged from my shopping experiences as a kid. Our family shopped almost exclusively at the A&P. Kroger’s would do in a pinch, but my mom insisted that A&P products were more economical. What she did with the pennies we saved, no one knows.
I suspect not much.
(She also collected S & H Green stamps: she would paste them in books and then redeem them for cheap-o household fixtures such as a framed print or an end table lamp. I seem to remember a special store where we went to exchange the stamps for crap. Our house was littered with such items.)
In the late 50’s intense competition among grocery stores forced them to use more and more creative marketing techniques. Some stores sold plates. The idea was that you bought a dish each week, and after eight weeks or so you had a whole set. You couldn’t miss a week or you would miss a plate.
Most grocery stores did stuff like that. In 1960 our local A&P sold the Golden Book Encyclopedia.
I loved the Golden Book Encyclopedia. The sixteen volume set offered information on such diverse topics as aardvarks, parasites, quicksand, volcanoes, and, naturally, dinosaurs. Personally, you can have the Encyclopedia Britannica. Most of it is a pretentious bore. I would much rather read the profusely illustrated article “How Rubber is Made” in my Golden Books any day of the week.
Volume one of the Golden Book sold for two cents. Volume two sold for forty-nine cents. There after successive books cost a buck. Some families dropped out at that point (often capping their children’s knowledge at “Cereal,”) but not my family. Once started we hung in there till we completed the entire set, index included.
My Golden Books were a true treasure. My older brother Allen had his pup tent and pocket knives (which was a pretty scary development in itself.) My younger brother Lowell had his toy garage and his “binkie.” And I had my books o’knowledge. I carried them with me everywhere, cracking one open whenever I wanted to read about the Aztecs, the solar system, the US mint, or the presidency of Millard Fillmore.
I still have them with me today.
Over time grocery stores sold classical records, science books, atlases, American history and high school encyclopedias. I understand why grocery stores took it upon themselves to transmit western culture to its shoppers. It was a business move to insure customer loyalty. But I loved them for it just the same.
Now, in the post grocery store encyclopedia age, there are other channels for cultural information: CNN, Rush Limbaugh and wikipedia come to mind. The grocery store encyclopedia is dead.
And we are the worse for it.
Next
My Summer of 1971
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