One recent evening my wife wasn’t feeling well and decided she needed some comfort food. She’s fond of Chex Mix the way Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell is (reportedly) fond of cocaine. It was 10:30, and she felt bad asking me to run an errand so late, but before she could finish the sentence, I’d grabbed the car keys. As it happens, I love grocery stores and will happily take any excuse to go to one.
I spent my teenage years working at a grocery store, starting as a bagger when I was 14 and ending up a produce manager a few years later. I can’t claim to have earned this meteoric ascent—speaking of illegal drugs, it was more likely the result of the meth-ravaged workforce in rural Oregon.
The work itself could be fairly tedious, but there was a lot of tomfoolery when no one was looking, such as turkey bowling. Set up the two-liter soda bottles like bowling pins at the end of the aisle, grab a Butterball, and let ’er rip. (Pro-tip: Pepsi products are for some reason less likely than Coke to shoot high fructose corn syrup everywhere when they’re hit by 20 pounds of frozen carcass.)
Given the all-purpose nature of grocery stores, they’re kind of the Star Wars cantina of retail. You see a surprising amount of fairly bizarre things. My sister put herself through several Grateful Dead tours—sorry, I meant to say “grad school”—working as a checker at a Safeway earning fat union wages. One day, an overeager teenage box jockey tried to hand deliver a 30-pound bag of cat litter to a customer by bypassing the line at the register behind them. Instead, he leapt over the bicycle cable cordoning off the adjacent unused register. Weighed down as he was, he tripped on the cable and fell forward, landing on the bag, causing it to explode and rain cat litter across five registers. My sister was still picking it out of her hair and laughing about it long after her shift ended.
But that was a comparatively tame mess to clean up. Remember when they used to sell gallon containers of cranberry juice in glass jars? We kept these on the lowest shelf to minimize the chances they’d be dropped, but some harried mother one day turned her back on her toddler, and before she knew it, three or four of these things went humpty-dumpty on him. Whenever a cleanup was announced on the juice aisle it filled me with dread, but this was an order of magnitude worse. I turned the corner and found Dennis the Menace splashing around in the hallway of blood from The Shining. I contemplated handing in my apron and box knife on the spot. Between the wet-dry vac and the mopping, that cleanup took the better part of an hour.
Though I haven’t worked at a grocery store in 25 years, if I’m there alone, I will still stand in the aisles absentmindedly pulling products forward on shelves and making sure the labels are facing outward for minutes before I notice what I’m doing. (We in the biz simply call this “facing the shelves.”) I also suppose I find a healthy comfort in being surrounded by material abundance. The modern grocery store is a marvel, and it sells so much more than food. Ever needed mousetraps or jumper cables after midnight? I have. Groceries are also a testament to the importance of global trade. My children have almost no concept of seasonal fruit, because when we need peaches in February, there’s always a planeload from Chile headed our way.
Speaking of which, I’ve been all over the world, and the quantity and quality of full-size grocery stores are about as good a barometer of the health of a society as you’re likely to find. In 1989, when future Soviet president Boris Yeltsin famously visited an ordinary grocery store in Clear Lake, Texas, he was gobsmacked and told the Russian members of his entourage that “there would be a revolution” if Russians knew what abundance ordinary Americans enjoyed. It was not an inaccurate prediction.
So be grateful for your humble grocery store, because the old cliché about citizens in Communist countries standing in line for hours to get basic goods like toilet paper remains as true as ever. Last year, soldiers loyal to Venezuela’s socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro were honored in special ceremonies where they took smiling photos as they were rewarded with toilet paper and other hygienic necessities that, thanks to Venezuela’s “economic reforms,” are almost impossible to buy there. If wanting stockpiles of Charmin and Listerine in every neighborhood makes me a decadent capitalist running dog, well, at least I won’t smell like one.
