Having just read Supermarket by Bobby Lee, I’m thinking about all the time I spend in my local supermarket, which is a lot of time. A lot of time. Because I work from home the supermarket is directly across the street from my house. Which translates to dashing over there every time I am missing even the most unnecessary condiments or ingredients—like, literally, if there’s no mustard, even if I’m having a meal that I would not normally use mustard with, I am across the street buying mustard within seconds. Because I can.
This is what being comfortable with your middle aged-ness looks like, BTW. Buying mustard because you can.
Anyway, I literally am in the supermarket at least once a day, sometimes twice, sometimes, in a cascade of incompetence, three or four times. Due to its convenience I imagine you can buy a long list of unlikely things at the supermarket, simply because somewhere deep in my lazy lizard brain I want the supermarket to sell whatever it is I need, from socks to furniture to deck screws. And when you spend as much time in a supermarket as I do, you become aware of just how crazy a place it is. On the one hand you have the food abstraction, as everything is presented in a plastic-wrapped, nutrition-labeled unit. And on the other hand you have the people, who are kind of nuts. And on the third hand you have the company behind it all, which is probably run by alien lizard people.
Nutrition Units
Sometimes I think supermarkets are part of an insidious psychological experiment. On the one hand, I am so divorced from my wild, hunter-gatherer-farmer roots that if the supermarkets were all sucked into a temporal anomaly, I’d starve almost immediately, withering away in a matter of minutes as my DNA simply assessed the situation as impossible and gave up.
On the other hand, their stocking practices are clearly designed to test us all. The supermarket is probably the only business in the world where being sold out of something indicates a lack of interest advising towards a lengthy think before reordering. Based on how often I will discover some product or foodstuff that I really enjoy, only to never see it again, I sometimes picture the manager sitting in his tiny office pondering the empty shelves in his store as some sort of insoluble mystery, a puzzle beyond human comprehension.
Insane People of The Supermarket
Shopping for food is a gauntlet of microaggressions and minor humiliations. Just the other day I ran across the street to purchase a single item, which anyone will tell you is a rookie move: Buying a single item is basically inviting the universe to enrage you, because the difficulty in paying and leaving the store is the inverse of the difficulty involved in acquiring your groceries.
I got behind a woman who was finishing her check out; all her items had been bagged and rung up. All she had to do was pay and exit the store. Which took a phenomenally long amount of time, as she proceeded to treat the check out line as if she were alone in the world. She checked her phone, fished for her sunglasses, unscrewed the cap on her water bottle and took a sip, went through her pockets, and performed a dozen other small organizational moves while I stood there, my one item rung up, the point-of-sale just past her. Finally, after enduring thirty seconds of this, I reached past her to pay, at which point, naturally, she became offended. The checkout guy, for his part, was clearly three hours into a four-hour shift and wanted nothing more than for all of us to dissolve into Thanos Snap Dust at our earliest opportunities.
The Lizard People
The fact that the company that operates this grocery store imagines that anyone enters it for any reason other than it is the closest and most convenient place to purchase Doritos and other necessities of life proves their alien origin. The other thing that proves their alien origin are there insane promotions, which generally involve complex ?games’ that require their customers to collect inane pieces of paper in the vague hope of winning money or groceries. The rules are labyrinthine, and the end result is that you’re handed a stack of paper about an inch thick every time you check out of the store.
I get that I’m supposed to hurry home and tear open my … I don’t know, tokens? tickets? and do … something with them. But I don’t, because my life does not revolve around jumping through the hoops my corporate masters put in place for me. I throw those tokens away, because I am a normal person. If the grocery store truly wants my affection and loyalty, they could hand me a crisp $5 bill once a week when I check out. That would do it. But this game token business? Lizard people thought that up.
Also, the grocery store stopped selling alcohol a few years ago, which angered me unreasonably as I now have to walk two blocks, like a sucker.