No-Frills Follies

I ended up standing outside the No-Frills store for about 25 minutes this morning, waiting for the Mister to finish his errands and come pick me up. (And for the 1 millionth time I wished he would get a cell phone. He says he doesn't need one, a sentiment with which I would respectfully, but violently, disagree. I suspect he really just doesn't want me to be able to reach him 24/7....it's bad enough that we work and live together.)

And as I stood there, basking in the sunshine, watching the fish thaw and the milk go sour, I had ample opportunity to observe my fellow shoppers. (Translation: I was bored to death.)

• There are lots of people with small children at the grocery store. Why grocery stores do not have ample public washroom space is beyond me....every single one of those kids has figured out that the way to liven up an otherwise dull shopping trip is to announce "I have to pee" smack in the middle of the dairy aisle. Because it is summer holidays and school is out, there were lots of children of various ages. Most were biddable and happy enough to go along on the outing, but there were a few (mosty 10 year old boys) clearly were going to make whatever adult was foolish enough to tote them along, pay. And dearly. I was glad I wasn't in their sights.


• There are lots of elderly people at the No-Frills, probably because it is the cheapest grocery store in town. Some of them were couples, and a few of the men exhibited the same outward demenor as the above mentioned 10-year-old boys.


• Many, many people are completely oblivious to their surrroundings. Like, to the point that you wonder if they have special needs or something. I saw one woman pull out a grocery cart from the Grocery Cart Incarceration Unit, and the stand right in front of it while she made a phone call, making every other person herniate themselves wrangling their carts around hers.


• The No-Frills store is one where you put a quarter in a little slot on the cart, to spring it free of all the other carts it is handcuffed to. A surprising number of people offered their carts to newcomers when they were done with it, and opted to forgo getting their quarter back. I just loved that.


• Apparently, at No-Frills, smiling, manners and exchanging pleasantries are all considered "frills" by the staff. I wonder if their job applications specify "must be surly, unco-operative and have a keen ability to display passive-aggressive behavior towards customers".


• No-Frills makes you buy your plastic bags for 5 cents each. They say it's to encourage people to be environmentally friendly, but I think it's just a way to make money. Seriously, does the environment care whether or not I pay for the bag I throw my garbage away in? Anyway, this results in some people resorting to truly hilarious methods of carrying their groceries out to their car. I saw one guy fill his hands and arms with milk, produce and frozen burgers, and carrying a package of 48 rolls of toilet paper in his teeth. I'll bet if he had been an African woman, he'd have had a box of detergent on his head, too.


• People buy a LOT of soda pop.

Finally the Mister came (they had had some sort of computer brou-ha-ha at Best Buy and he got all caught up in it.) and we went home speedy quick to put everything away. A morning well spent.

Cautionary Tale

I usually do the grocery shopping on Mondays.....no crowds + day off = Happy Mrs. Loudshoes. There are about 3 grocery stores that I frequent, depending on my mood, their specials and what I need to get.....No Frills is really cheap, but the staff is surly and testy, and there's no deli. Loblaws has everything I could ever need or want, but it's a bit more expensive and I have to dress up because I am bound to meet every single person I ever knew that I want to think well of me. Sobey's is in the middle, not too expensive, not too socially demanding, but they seem to change the entire layout of the store constantly, so that I end up going around and around the store about thirty times just to get paper towels and butter.

I went to Sobey's last week because they had pot roasts on sale and I was wearing running shoes.

I was texting Thing 1 at one point, because she had written something hilarious on my shopping list. As I was going along with my grocery cart, one of the young guys that works there jokingly said "you shouldn't text and drive", which made me laugh. As I did so, I rounded the corner to start up another aisle, and I managed to take out an entire end display of disposible aluminum trays, complete with lids. I mean, I caught that thing with the front end of my cart and absolutley clobbered it with an almight force that knocked it sideways and spewed disposible aluminum trays and their lids in a most spectacular fashion. The young guy doubled over laughing, but quickly recovered himself long enough to apologize and take in my reaction. I was too busy doubling over myself, and had trouble hearing him. He said he hoped I wasn't offended at him laughing, and I said I didn't see how he could help it; it was quite a breathtaking episode.
His boss happened by, to find the two of us picking up the stuff while wiping our eyes and occasionally bursting into guffaws. The kid said it was the best thing he'd seen all day.

Luckily, aluminum foil pans do not leave much of a mess, and we managed to clean it up quickly, but I'll tell you, those things can fly. There was one that must have been twenty feet away.

So not only should you not text and drive, you should probably not text and drive a grocery cart, either.

How To Piss Off Mrs. Loudshoes At the Grocery Store.

• Don't bother parking your car in a parking spot which is all the way over in the parking lot. Pull right up to the front door and put on your four-way flashers and run in "for a few things". No one else is as busy as you, and they can just wait while your car blocks traffic.
• Wander aimlessly through the store, making sure you are everywhere I want to be. Don't pay any attention to anyone else in the store. Because you are the only one there!
• Be sure to wait until the lady at the deli comes to you before you even begin to think about what you want. Lots of "ummmming" and "I don't knows" go a long way to making Mrs. Loudshoes' head explode. Be sure to ask for thirteen different kinds of deli meat, all shaved, and make sure they have to show you how much 100 grams is every. single. time.
• Take this opportunity to have a long heart-to-heart talk with your neighbour. In the dairy aisle.
• Advise me, without provocation, on my purchases. "Don't buy that tuna, it's not as good as this tuna". Look at me like I'm crazy when I say "I don't care; it's for the cat."
• Abandon your cart cross-ways in the aisle. Go away to a whole other aisle for a half an hour or so. Be mad when someone has had the audacity to move your cart.
• Pretend you can't get around me and sigh loudly.
• Have a loud and heated arguement with your roommate about the moral, philosophical and far-reaching implications of buying low-sodium soy sauce vs. the fully leaded soy-sauce.
• Let your six-year old drive the cart. Because he is fabulous at that. Never mind that he can't see where he's going, he has the co-ordination of a drunken monkey and he's alarmingly aggressive, he's just so darling!
• Don't bother putting your cart away. Just leave it in the parking spot, where it can roll away into someone else's car.

If you do all of this, don't be surprised when I just happen to sneak in expensive, stinky cheese into your cart. Or maybe condoms. Or Depends. I have to have my fun somehow.

An Open Letter....

Dear Lady on Your Cellphone in the Grocery Store Yesterday,

You really thought you could manage both, didn't you? You probably thought you were doing a perfectly passable job of manoevering your shopping cart and choosing items from the shelf and chatting away to your friend/sister/mother/husband. But let speak for the rest of the customers at No-Frills and state clearly and without reservation: YOU WERE NOT. YOU WERE A FREAKING TRAIN WRECK THAT MOVED ALL OVER THE STORE.

No one could escape you; no matter where we fled, there you were. Produce aisle? You were blocking the seedless green grapes that were on sale. Cereal aisle? You were perpendicular. Freezer department? No one could open a door without getting around you first. I nearly lost my shit altogether when I tried to get around you for the umpteenth time and you veered into the middle of the aisle and then stopped dead. Seriously, I nearly rammed right into you to teach you a lesson; you should count your lucky stars that you have any Achilles tendons left intact.

I kind of feel sorry for the person on the other end of the phone (although, really, that person had a choice to hang up or not, we had to put up with you no matter what.) Your conversation, while entirely audible to all and sundry, was less than scintillating. What the person you were talking to was going to do with the running commentary on your shopping trip is anybody's guess...."They are out of Nutrigrain bars again" will likely not count as one of the major high's of anyone's day.

Please take this in the nicest way possible: "Multitasking: It's not for everyone". Drive the cart, shop for your groceries, talk on the phone, just not all at once. Don't make me sever your Achille's tendons.

Love,
Mrs. Loudshoes.

Self-Serve Checkouts

I have a confesson to make: I love the self-serve checkouts at the grocery store. From talking to other people, I think I supposed to loathe them; everyone else seems to. But I use them quite happily, and without incident, and they satisfy my super-secret desire to use the scanner all by myself.

Some people object to the self-serve checkouts because they are confusing and hard to use. Really? Because last time I looked, the gum-chewing, monosyllabic teenager who passes my stuff over the scanner does not have a PhD in geophysics. Now, I will allow that those scanners take a little bit of getting used to; the first few times I took a crack at them it was like something out of an episode of "I Love Lucy", but I figured them quickly enough, and use them all the time now.

I know some people also object to the self-serve checkouts because they take a job away from a person, and diminish the human interaction in the transaction. Now, I'm not thrilled to be doing someone out of a job, but, seriously? my shopping expedition has rarely been improved by the bored silence or surly grunts of the person checking out my groceries. Cashiers who have entire conversations with their co-workers (usually complaining about their breaks, or bosses or how little that cow over at the service desk does at closing time every night) while they are getting my order through piss me right off. If that cashier doesn't bother to even tell me what the total of my bill is, and just stands there waiting for me to look at the screen with her hand out, I am enraged beyond all reason.
Worse, is the cashier who feels the need to comment on my purchases....."oooh, someone's having a party!" (No, not really. But thanks for the reference to our less than ideal eating habits.)
"Wow, you sure must like a lot of salad!" (Actually, the idea that buying three heads of romaine for 4 people for one week is not really that crazy. And judging by the size of you, salads, and vegetables in general, is a concept you might want to investigate in the near future.) "What do you do with this?" (in reference to an avocado) (I slather it all over my naked body and dance around a campfire singing "Copacabana".)

Having said that, I do have some very favorite cashiers, who I will make a point of going to every time I see them working at my local Loblaws. There is Val, who I went to high school with, who aways welcomes me warmly and is good for a laugh. There is Speedy Meg, who can whip through those codes for the produce like nobody's business. (She might actually be working towards a PhD in geophysics.) And Cory, who is about as much fun as one can handle while standing in line at the checkout...he's outgoing, and cheerful and clearly loves talking to people
and is unfailingly good company. I will happily skip the self-checkout if any one of them are working, even if I'm only buying a pack of gum.

If you are at the grocery store with a couple of children, fewer bribes are more effective than "if you do that again you won't be able to scan stuff at the checkout". Honestly, the self-checkout is the best, most immediate reward for good behavior ever invented. My kids are 12 and 15 and they still beg to be able to do the work at the checkout. I heard a woman with a couple of preschoolers at the grocery store threaten to use the cashier if they didn't behave, and man, did that do the job. It was like they were little self-serve checkout addicts, and she said she'd withhold their hit.

Now, if I could just get a self-serve checkout at the passport office, or the American border, or doctor's office, that would be very sweet.

Vegetables, Smegetables.

Since this week is March Break, and our kids are off school, (and, apparently, the ONLY family in the entire province that has not gone to the Caribbean for the week. I'm sure you've heard all about it on the news.) we took the kids across the border to do some shopping in Michigan for the day. The Mister and I are off on Mondays, so it worked out fine.

We spent a bit of time at Hollister, which is the Holy Grail of retail for our children, since there isn't one in our city. (Hollister, in case you've never been there, is dark, loud, expensive and they spray all the clothes with their own cologne, which is pleasant enough at first, but eventually strangles your entire sinus cavity with it's overwhelming hipness. It's sort of like quicksand for your nose.) After that we went to Meijer's, which we don't have in Canada, and the Loudshoes family enjoys very much. (Just to tell you, Meijer's is just like Wal-Mart, a department store and grocery store all in one, but with the bright shiny allure of novelty. At least for us.) Now, I've gone on at length before about how thrilling I fine American grocery stores, and my children are similarly enraptured. We spent ages marvelling over what inventive cereal flavors Americans come up with, and in awe of what these people can do to a frozen pizza. It seriously entertained us for hours.

But what really fired us up was this:

Diet Coke Plus, a new (for us, anyway) kind of Diet Coke with vitamins and minerals. Because it's never too late to throw a lifejacket into the Titanic of nutrition.

Grocery Store Follies.

It must be September: it's silly season at the grocery store. Every year at this time the grocery store is inundated with university students who have either A) never stepped foot inside a grocery store or, more likely B) never stepped inside of a grocery store to buy groceries. Most of them are probably getting dinner on the table for the first time by themselves, and I do have a certain sympathy for that. Running a house well is not easy, and it's tough enough to do it for yourself let alone a couple of other people who don't know any more than you do about it. But I can't fathom the people who wander into the store looking for the "Toast" section. They should probably just order take-out. I am particularly interested in the contents of the carts, too. The young women get about 10 cases of bottled water, a metric tonne of fat-free yogurt and some zucchini. The men load up on pasta, potato chips and Kraft Dinner. (I once dated a guy in university who lived in an older house, which had very high ceilings and the kitchen cupboards went all the way up to the top. He and his room mates were ecstatic to find themselves at a store which had Kraft Dinner on for 15 cents a box, and they bought as much as they could drag home. I'd bet they bought a hundred boxes. It delighted them no end that they could fill the kitchen cupboards so that when you threw open the doors, all you could see was floor to ceiling Kraft Dinner. I think that was the highlight of their university careers.)

I took the girls grocery shopping the other day so that we could get stuff for lunches. (I've learned the hard lesson that what I think is a satisfying lunch and what they consider a satisfying lunch are two wildly different things.) Thing 1 has to stay for lunch at school now, since it's a bit of a hike from high school to home. But the upside is that she can bring peanut butter to school for the first time in 11 years. Hallelujah! (I guess the powers-that-be figure that high school students can be trusted to be responsible for what they put in their mouths, which leads me to believe that they have never met any high school students.) Thing 1 and Thing 2 both asked hopefully if we could get white bread for their lunches, like this was some far-and-away vision that they could only ever hope for, like winning the lottery or something. When I said yes they got all swoony and misty eyed. Then, having had that particular aspiration come true, they asked if we could also get 2% milk. I said yes to that one too, and they practically hoisted me onto their shoulders. Who knew? (My friend Wendy's daughter once asked for 2% milk for Christmas. I had no idea 2% milk was the ultimate ideal for so many children, including my own. Maybe we should start up a charity for such deprived youth.)

I also had a very nice,but incredibly innocent cashier; she kept asking me what all the produce was, and what I would be using it for. At first I thought she was new and was asking because she needed to know for all the product codes, but no, she was really quite curious. "What kind of lettuce is this?", "Romaine", "Huh. So, what do you use that for?", "Salad", "Wow." This went on for most of my produce. Okay, I can see you maybe not knowing the difference between parsley and cilantro, and I get that not everyone knows what a mango looks like, but an avocado? Yellow squash? Ginger? Finally I decided that she was an alien sent from another planet to discover more about humans and their habits, and from then on, I found it much easier to get along with her.

A Good Time at the Grocery Store

From what I've written here in the past, you can be forgiven for thinking that I spend most of my waking hours at the grocery store. I don't; I just spend more time pondering the grocery store than most people would.

I went at around 6:00 tonight, a Sunday, and it was hella busy. Why aren't all these people at home in the cozy embrace of their families having a Norman Rockwellian Sunday dinner? Mosty because the population was largely made up of university students, and their families are long forgotten.

Whoever is in charge of the music at Loblaws could be my new best friend, because it rocked tonight....they played a goodly portion of the soundtrack from my teen years (The Cars, some Neil Young and even some Elvis Costello) My 20's was nicely represented by Michael Jackson when he was still good and before he got weird, the Clash and some Ramones, and then they played some Dave Matthews (who, if you didn't already know, is my "Rock and Roll Boyfriend".)
I hardly wanted to leave.

I spent a while mentallly listing the "Things I Thought I'd Never In A Million Years Buy":
1 Velveeta: plastic "cheese" which comes in a colour which nature never intended. I'm not from France and I'm not picky about my cheese, but no one is more surprised than me that I actually buy this stuff. I'm ashamed to say that I prefer the sauce this makes with broccoli than anything I've made with real cheddar.
2. Hamburger Helper. "Full of salt! And chemicals! and it's processed cheese food! I can make better crap than this myself!! " Then I had children, and so many deeply held beliefs fell by the wayside. What can I say? Things change.
3. Soy Milk Does anything say "healthy stuff is disgusting" quite like soy milk? Even the name "soy milk" indicates "there is nothing remotely fun about this whatsoever" But.....it's not so bad. Dare I say, I even LIKE it on oatmeal?
4. Melba Toast Much like soy milk, melba toast has all the trappings of dreary, dietary correctness, unmitigated by salt, fat or sugar. Having said that, I sometimes like it's boring, neutrality with cheese and soup.

There were two incredibly obnoxious around-twelve-years-old boys who were inflicting themselves on all and sundry at the same time I was there. As they careened the grocery cart around the produce section, slamming into displays and narrowly missing other shoppers, their mother (?) occasionally would waft a vague "cut it out" in their direction. This had no effect whatsoever on the two career criminals she was raising. By the time I got to the check out, the boys had managed to engage a second cart, whose main purpose, as far as I could see, was to present an obstacle for the first cart to overcome. This was accompanied by loud whoo-hoooing and trash talking and about as annoying as anything I've ever seen. I actually re-routed myself several times in order to avoid them. When I went out to the parking lot, it came to pass that the two young men had managed to crash BOTH carts into the side of their large, black SUV, leaving noticable dents in both the front and back doors. I cannot begin to tell you how satisfying in the extreme this was to me.