Lost In the Supermarket - The Clash
Surfing the internet is like shopping at IKEA. You can’t just get in and get out, you get sucked in for hours, lost in the labyrinth of pages and room dioramas. Eventually you forgot what you came there for in the first place, and your shopping cart is full with stuff you didn’t even know you needed.
This is how I feel about food shopping at Fairway here in Brooklyn. The milk and bread are about a mile walk from the front door through a series of isles set up to put all of the fragile and crushable things at the bottom of your cart, and the heavy things like bottled water at the top. All the gourmet things are at the beginning of the food obstacle course, and you have blown your cash wad midway through and still haven’t hit the bread, dairy, or the frozen food isles. It is also as cold as the frozen north inside and I always forget to have a parka lying around my car when its 90 degrees out.
Here in Brooklyn, when you want to go food shopping, you can go on-line and “order Fresh Direct” as we say. They deliver your groceries to your door from their plant in Queens usually by the next day. The problem with this is that you have to be cool with someone else picking out your vegetables, and don’t mind a LOT of packaging and having to be home for a 3 hour window to wait, …and then some sweaty stranger walk your groceries into your house. Frankly its a small price to pay not to have to come face to face with humanity.
Going food shopping in Brooklyn…being the beautiful assortment of many cultures and classes that it is…is a test in tolerance. People have different ideas of personal space, different senses of time, style of speech and awareness of its volume. Hey its one reason I live here, I feel uncomfortable in homogenized society. So I am all for live and let live, but people’s obliviousness for other people outside of themselves is infuriating. I am not talking about a particular culture necessarily. In fact an upper class woman of whatever culture pissed me off royally today in Key Food. Now let me first say that Key Food on 5th Avenue is the best food store in Brooklyn. It is spacious and they play rockabilly all day long. It is in fact the last time I heard the song Tallahassee Lassie. The manager has a display of beer in no less then 5 places. He is an Anglophile so he positions himself in the front of the store between the end-caps of British food (Pims, Mallowmars, Crumpets and PG Tips) and imported beer. So if you are ever buying something from either he will engage you in conversation about it. They carry organic baby food and organic vegetables. All very nice but you still have to deal with the public. And after my last trip to Target to buy diapers, I am thinking of getting everything delivered. Its New York, I probably could get anything delivered really.
So in Key Food today, this woman stood in front of me in the handicapped check out isle as I stood there with my double stroller. I asked her to please let me get through (she would have simply needed to remove herself from the isle, about 3 steps distance). She said as if sucking on a Lemonhead “you can’t get that through there.”, to which I said nicely while pointing at the handicapped sign above her head “actually its the handicapped isle so its the only isle I CAN get out of.” to with she replied in a Verruca-Salt-I-want-it-NOW-daddy-voice “Well then I would have to move.” I just looked at her and shook my head, and wheeled my babes out the in, and ran for it between the automatic doors to go back in the out to meet Tom who was bagging our groceries. I noticed it was quiet except for the beeps of the scanners and Buddy Holly singing Not Fade Away in the background. Apparently Tom had watched the whole thing and yelled at her in front of everyone. He said it went something like this “You are the rudest person I have ever met!”. Either way, she got the message. It is often the Park Slope upper middle classer that is the rudest. I remember this from the food store in Berkeley CA called Berkeley Bowl. A supposed progressive thinking community like Park Slope, but people were swatting each other in the face with bock choi to get in line first. The circle meets itself around the other end I s’pose. So open minded they are closed. They are building a Whole Foods here now too. I may be forced to purchase their banana nut muffins on occasion, but I will not shop there. Too much of that bad element.
Soon my annoying double stroller will make way for two toddlers grabbing anything in reach. The whole shopping experience will be a lengthy opera on power, control and discipline with an extensive cast. The longest beer run ever. But I have a feeling the shopping adults will be the ones who will be repremanded to behave themselves. Hmmm. Or I can just have it delivered. I wish IKEA deivered too. I wouldn’t mind pre-fondled vegetables, or particle board for that matter.
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