I like the supermarket. I go there a lot. Where I live, we have the Giant, which is my favorite. I’m not too proud to go to the other ones on occasion, although I have to confess that the Kroger and the Food Lion do tend to be a little depressing and, well, Eastern European, no offence or anything. They tend to remind me of the time I went to East Berlin, when there still was an East Berlin, and they made you change up a certain amount of East German currency which you absolutely had to spend, but then there was nothing to buy, so you ended up buying a packet of sugar-free cookies and a pamphlet by Lenin. The shoe stores didn’t have any shoes in them. Insert old Soviet joke here. But really, it was kind of a downer. This is what I think about sometimes when I go to the Food Lion and the Kroger.

When I was in graduate school, I’d go to the Giant at two in the morning, just because I could. Now that I have a more-or-less regular job I can’t really be caught doing much of anything at that hour, so my visits to the store are more regular. I have many friends who do not share my affinity for the retail grocery environment. My friend Paul gets all disoriented in such spaces, experiencing something akin to a postmodern or otherwise existential angst. He literally gets lost in the supermarket and starts to worry about just about everything. The supermarket distresses him on a very fundamental level. My most recent, and lamentably now former, girlfriend, used to hate the supermarket. I’m sure she still does. She’d do anything to avoid going. She’d give me a list; she’d sit in the car while I’d go in and shop on her behalf. Somehow, this reminds me of my grandfather, who would go out in traffic to drive to the supermarket even when he was almost eighty and had cataracts, armed with a list from my grandmother. He’d crash the car pretty often and just pay the people with his checkbook because he didn’t want to bother the insurance company. And he really loved my grandmother, even though she didn’t reciprocate a whole lot, so this was probably one of the many ways in which he was honoring her. Maybe this is why I broke up with my girlfriend, because I didn’t like the prospect of replicating my grandfather’s luck at the supermarket, and because I maybe didn’t want to be with a girl who didn’t like the supermarket as much as I did, and I didn’t want to go to the supermarket by myself for the rest of my life knowing that my girlfriend/wife didn’t love me as much as I loved her. I don’t know, I’m clutching at straws a little bit with that comparison, but I certainly do miss her. But I really didn’t mind going to the grocery store on her behalf. In fact, I considered it to be kind of a privilege and an honor. If I were a writing instructor, I would rip this paragraph apart. I mean, what’s the topic sentence, for crying out loud?

There’s been quite the turnover in supermarkets since I’ve lived in this town. For a time there a few years ago, we had a grocery store called Farmer Jack, which is part of the A&P family of supermarkets. Nowadays their motto is something like “We’re Thinking Fresh,” but back then it was more like “We’re Stompin’ Out High Prices,” and there was a mechanical Farmer Jack suspended from the roof as you entered the store. One of the mechanical Farmer Jack’s legs would go up and down in a stompin’-out-high-prices kind of motion and you could hear the motor grind and groan. It was one of the most exhilarating things I’ve ever seen. I was also constantly rather surprised that the mechanical Farmer Jack always seemed to survive the wear and tear of all that stompin’. It was the kind of crappy device that you might expect always to be broken, but the mechanical Farmer Jack was kind of a trooper. honestly.

Back in the day before the Giant was taken over by a large Dutch corporation (I think they’re Dutch. They may be Belgian. I get my multinational grocery concerns a little mxed up sometimes.) and remodelled to suit the new corporate ethos, the butcher’s section at the Giant near my house had a big neon sign above the counter that said “MEAT.” It was the kind of sign you might see on Broadway, except that it said “MEAT” and not “CHICAGO” or “ANNIE.” This was also entirely exhilarating. I’d go there with my friends and we’d never fail to say, as we rounded aisle seven, “Look, ‘MEAT.’” And everyone would feel edified. Some of the more frivolous members of our company would laugh, but I never found it funny somehow. I found it impressive. And romantic.

Now we have a second Giant, that’s how lucky and bourgeois we are. We have two Giants. The second one is so fancy, I don’t even know if I can do it justice in a mere word painting. But you’ll get a little idea of how fancy it is when I tell you that when you get out of your car in the parking lot and turn around to head into the store, you can see the Blue Ridge Mountains. The Blue Ridge Mountains. How lucky do you have to be to live in a town where the new supermarket has a stunning view of the Blue Ridge Fucking Mountains? And that’s even before you go inside.

A few years ago, also while I was still in graduate school, we got word that Harris Teeter was coming to town. I don’t know much about the provenance of Harris Teeter, but I understood at the time that it was kind of southern and a little bit fancy. Because I was in graduate school, I didn’t have to miss the grand opening. I got up on the morning they were opening and went down there. They had lots of free stuff, you know like little pieces of sausage cooked by older ladies wearing toques, and baguette with fancy oils and vinegars for dipping. It was pretty posh, I guess, but it didn’t blow me away or anything. I’m still a little suspicious of the Harris Teeter for some reason. I always get the feeling that they’re trying to put one over on me. But we do still have fun with the punniness of the name. People variously call it The Teet, The Hairy Peter, and a few other things. But I think Harris Teeter is pretty much funny enough all by itself.

I’m sad that we don’t have a Piggly Wiggly, though. I’m really jealous of people who live in a town that has a Piggly Wiggly, because they get to say, at least once a week, ”Hey, I’m going to the Piggly Wiggly, does anybody need anything?” Or, say I bought something really cool, or got a good deal on chickens or something like that, people might say, “Hey, nice chickens, where’d you get those?” and I could reply, all proud of myself, “At the Piggly Wiggly.”

I went to Florida a couple of times. They have these grocery stores called Publix. I don’t understand that name. It wouldn’t be anywhere near as exciting to say, “I’m going to the Publix, does anybody need anything?” But I’ll bet that some people who live in Florida and frequent the Publix have a lot of fun saying, “I’m going to the Pubix, does anybody need anything.” I guess that would be kind of funny. But we have Harris Teeter, so I get that kind of fun from them instead. So I really don’t need a Publix for that.

I go to the supermarket even when I don’t need anything. My mother will call me on the weekends sometimes and say, “What are you doing today?” And sometimes I’ll have something going on, and I’ll tell her about it if it isn’t illegal or embarrassing. But I’ll always say, “I’m going to the supermarket.” And she’ll usually say, “What are you going to get there?” And I’ll usually reply, “Oh, I don’t know, it kind of depends on what they have.” I just like walking around in there, reading the special weekly sales bulletin that they have at the front, earmarking some particular bargains like orange juice or something, which can otherwise be kind of expensive. I wonder sometimes at the logic of what they put on sale. I’m sure it’s some kind of capitalist scam that I would have learned about in Economics class if I’d ever taken Economics, but I do get excited when I see that they have some Healthy Choice products at Buy One, Get One Free or something like that. It’s also weird when things are on sale. Like, soup is never on sale in the summer. It’s only on sale in the winter. If I owned a grocery store, I’d put it on sale in the summer, because that’s right when people don’t need soup. So people would buy it out of season. I’m guessing that people will buy soup in the winter whether it’s on sale or not, because it’s cold and they need soup. I think I might be quite good at running a grocery store, to be honest with you.

There are some recent developments at the supermarket where my personal jury is still out (I don’t mean by this to say that I have twelve of my peers in my head or anything, deciding on whether or not I should like certain developments at the supermarket of late, but it’s a just a figure of speech that means I’m not sure how I feel about some of these things yet.). For example, you can get sushi at a lot of supermarkets now. This feels wrong, somehow. I love sushi, but I don’t feel entirely confident in a sushi purchase from the store. For similar reasons, I probably wouldn’t buy, say, an engagement ring at the grocery store either. I guess it’s a compartmentalization thing. Maybe it’s a neurosis and I need to get over myself, and call me old-fashioned, etc., but I just don’t feel right buying my sushi from there. Also, I got sick a couple of times when I bought sushi from the grocery store. I won’t tell you which one it was, but it wasn’t the Giant. They wouldn’t play me that way.

Another thing I’m not sure about at some of the supermarkets these days is the “Self Checkout Line.” There are several things about this that make me a little uneasy, apart from the fact that I fear change and adapt slowly to new circumstances and scenarios. First of all, I don’t want to check myself out (that sounds like some preliminary reference to masturbation, which I’m definitely not going to make, so don’t worry about it, I just meant that I don’t like to scan my own groceries. Oh, see, now it’s just getting worse. Neither of those two preceding remarks was about masturbation, OK, just calm down). I like the supermarket to take care of me. Now, I understand that some people like the “convenience” of checking themselves out, and I wish them all the best. But I’d rather talk to a human and have a little interaction with my grocery shopping. Also, there’s a political point to be made. I don’t want someone not to have a job at the grocery store if they need one, just so I can experience the “convenience” of self-checkout. Also, wouldn’t you expect your groceries to be cheaper if you were in the self-checkout line? They aren’t, of course. So all of that makes me suspicious. And I don’t like feeling suspicious at the grocery store. It’s a place I go to get away from those kinds of feelings.

The other thing I don’t like about the self-checkout line is when you’ve scanned something and you haven’t put it on the belt yet and this automated voice says, “Move your….NUTS….to the belt.” It’s really kind of embarrassing, to be honest with you, because the automated voice is pretty loud and I don’t necessarily want everyone to hear what I’m buying, not that I’m buying anything embarrassing, although somebody hearing a robot say, “Move your…NUTS…to the belt” might easily get the wrong end of the stick. It doesn’t always say “Move your…NUTS…to the belt,” it only says that if you’ve bought and scanned nuts, so “Move your…PRUNES…to the belt” is, I suppose, marginally less embarrassing, but then everyone knows that you’re buying prunes. I don’t buy prunes, I’m just saying, if I did, I’m not sure I’d want the world to know about it, you know?

Sorry to go on and on for my very first Tattered Coat post. Believe it or not, I probably have a lot more to say about the supermarket. But I’ll spare you for the time being.

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