Showing posts with label supermarkets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label supermarkets. Show all posts

Monday, April 06, 2009

Supermarkets make me grumpy

I'm beginning to wonder what is exactly super about them. I remember when I was growing up going to the Stop and Shop in Wilton, CT with my dad every week. It was fun (I had no social life to speak of) and I got to push my own cart around and go look for the sales. That was back when I knew how to function in Supermarkets. Now, supermarkets put me into such a state, my brother won't talk to me for about 15 minutes.

According to my family from the city, supermarkets were a pretty suburban thing. In New York City, you went to the butchers, bakers, grocers...they were all different stores. Now they're all packed into a hermetically sealed environment that could not be further removed from nature. Everything seems to be "buy one get one" nowadays to part us with a few more bucks. Let me try to explain why I don't like supermarkets anymore. First of all, it's a barrage of colors. Things stacked to the ceiling in bright attractive colors are just too much for me to handle. I also am totally lost when I have to pick out new toiletries - too much choice. My biggest supermarket for years was a room about the size of the Chester House TV room (that's for you L) and stocked with one of everything. They had marmite, it made me happy. Supersizing in America has gone to the extreme! It's tricky how they put the biggest size at eye level and any person with a healthy appetite has to go to their knees looking for sensible portions. It's almost as if it's an act of contricition for not buying the gluttonus portions.

The thing that makes me grumpy is that my local store (a ghetto place called thriftway) has more food in it than I saw in my entire village in Africa. Then people just go and eat crap! Even though, to be fair, I did buy and B1G1 of gallon tubs of ice cream.

I'm going to sulk now.