The typical grocery store shopping experience is fraught with annoyances starting with the parking lot and ending with coming home and having to put away all of those groceries! My situation is complicated by the fact that someone in my house has to eat gluten free and not all the products I need for him can be bought at the mainstream grocery stores I frequent.
Here is the experience I typically have on grocery day. Well, let me rephrase that. I don't have grocery day anymore. I have multiple grocery days each week. I am at the grocery store at least 3 times a week because I serve a lot of fresh produce and like to have meats and fish be as fresh as possible. This cannot be accomplished in a one day a week shopping system. Things go bad too quickly. Also, if the gluten free item I need is not in stock at the moment I am at the Whole Foods market, I have to return to the Whole Foods market another time.
I frequently shop at the least expensive grocery store in my area, Market Basket. That is a challenge in itself. It is not a nice store. It is not an especially clean store. It has no salad bar, no fancy lighting, often has odd smells, and is jam packed with shoppers; old shoppers, shoppers with 6 children, shoppers that leave carts in the middle of the aisle and wander off. It is not a pleasant experience.
Since the recession began, more and more people are shopping there so it is almost never quiet. The reason I shop there more than anywhere else is simple. They have lower prices all the time on grocery items and they have much better prices and a better selection of produce than any other reasonably priced store in our area and I buy a lot of produce. It pains me to pay $1.00 more for a jar of spaghetti sauce at Shaws or Stop N Shop than I would pay at Market Basket. That is the typical savings you get there. If you extrapolate that across your whole cartload of food, you can usually save at least $20.00 or more on regular grocery items by shopping there.
So back to the start. I get to the parking lot and that tells me just how unpleasant the experience will be. On the weekends, the parking lot is usually so full that it is hard to find any space at all. That tells me I really am going to hate being there! So once I find a space (if I opt to stay at all) I have to dodge all of the carts left in the lot randomly. They only have a couple of cart corrals so most people are too lazy to return their cart and just leave them in the parking space.
I make my way into the store weaving around mindless people leaving carts all over the place, kids running amok around the front of the store because they are bored waiting in the long checkout lines. Phew. I made it to the first aisle, dairy. Now I find out the yogurt I have always eaten for as long as I can remember (Columbo) will no longer be sold anywhere! Great. There are pallets of cold food waiting to be placed on shelves. There are people weaving in and out of the traffic flow around these pallets. I actually tripped and fell on a small box of something that was left in front of a pallet simply because I didn't see it. This does not bode well for this shopping trip. I stop at the fish counter. They do have the freshest fish of any store in our area..they get theirs delivered every day. There is some annoying woman asking for all of her haddock to be skinned. Really? Let's make 10 people in line wait so you can have your haddock skinned? GRRRRR. I get my nice salmon and off I go back to the aisles.
One theme is repeated over and over again all throughout the store. The senior bus has always just dropped of a gaggle of elderly shoppers right before I arrived. I think they time it just so! So now, all of them are having their social hour in the middle of the aisle I am trying to run through. Excuse me....excuse me....excuse me...nobody even hears me because they have turned down their hearing aides!
It is much worse when men are in the store. I am sorry to 50% of you. I am sure there are some men who usually do their family's weekly grocery shopping but you obviously don't shop at Market Basket in Bellingham. The men I see have no concept of grocery store protocol. And they don't know where things are in the store so they are doing the back and forth shuffle. Please: Don't walk halfway down the aisle leaving your cart to block the entrance of the aisle. Don't stand NEXT TO your cart virtually blocking all traffic in the aisle. Try to shop with the traffic pattern..not against it. Up one aisle and down the next. That is the flow. The good part of the men shopping in the store is they usually cluster in aisles I don't need to buy much in. They are in the chips aisle and the cereal aisle.
When you get to produce all bets are off. Lots of employees stocking (read: blocking flow), lots of carts without drivers, people blocking the dispenser of plastic baggies for your produce. Oh, and lots and lots of shoppers that don't speak English. You really have to learn how to say excuse me in about 5 languages in order to speed your experience at Market Basket.
One other major annoyance to me is the people that come in with many many children. I am a Mom. My kids were little at one time. I always had one in the cart and one by my side or close by. I didn't allow them to run around or be in a different aisle than I was. If they got in somebodies way, I immediately moved them. This is not the rule at Market Basket. I get it that if you have a lot of kids, you are sometimes forced to bring them. But do think of the others shopping there. Use the carts with the little bench for 3 on them. That will make us all a lot happier.
Shopping at Market Basket is almost like playing a video game. Start your engine, carts ready, GO....dodge old deaf lady, look out for pallet on the floor, ding, ding, (getting points for that one) lean left and then right around skipping toddlers, look out for falling canned goods (that one earns you an extra life) If you are lucky, at the end of the race, you have not forgotten something (lose 50 points) and you don't have to wait 1/2 hour with your melting ice cream at the check out. The winner of this game gets to go home and put away all of their groceries.
On that note, I am, unhappily, off to the grocery store.
No comments:
Post a Comment