I am a creature of habit. It’s been three months since we moved, and I still drive to my old house by mistake. I automatically open the mailbox and sort through the new owner’s mail, which isn’t just stupid, it’s criminal.
Sometime just before the afternoon of Dec. 24, diabolical human beings rearranged almost everything on the shelves at Kroger. No one called me, there was no warning…but when I entered the store on Christmas Eve, it was evident that the grocery world as I knew it had changed forever.
The salad bar was gone (too much waste, they said), roasted chickens were no longer in their tantalizing display. The meat department was in the same place, but the king crab legs were where the flank steak used to be and the stuffed pork chops were in the chicken compartment. The organic yogurt section was eliminated and combined with the regular yogurt, something Kroger might get away with, but they’d never try that at Whole Foods.
I wandered around aimlessly with the shopping list Mary Ellen had given me. I stopped at the wine and beer department, which expanded when they eliminated the salad bar. I asked an employee why they had changed everything. “Don’t ask me,“ she said. “I’m just the wine lady.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s why I am whining about this to you. I can’t find anything.”
I decided I needed some help, so I walked toward the soup stand, which is now where the flowers used to be. “Excuse me,” I said to one of the employees. “Where can I find cereal?”
“Oh, cereal is now next to the breakfast bars.”
“That doesn’t help me,” I explained, ‘’because I no longer know where the breakfast bars are. They used to be in the coffee aisle, but the coffee isn’t there anymore. This was like someone giving me directions when I am lost in an unfamiliar town and telling me to turn left where the old church used to be.
Throughout the store, there was a lot of conversation among the customers — shoppers sharing moving stories of pickles they can no longer locate, kitty litter that has vanished and the Sushi Bar that everyone swore was right in that corner just the other day. Jenny’s story really tugged at my heartstrings…
“It was 10 years ago when Joe and I first walked down the aisle together— aisle 7, to be exact. We had so many fond memories of granola, Frosted Flakes and Raisin Bran. Now those memories have been lost forever. Instead, it’s Heinz Ketchup, Gulden’s Mustard and Hellman’s Light Mayonnaise. It’s just not the same anymore.”
When I got to the checkout counter, I saw Vickie, who has the hardest job at Kroger. She is the person who comes running when your self-scanner machine says: HELP IS ON THE WAY. I told her that despite that day’s confusing experience, I finally found everything on my shopping list. Which is a lot better than shopping at Marsh…where you can’t find a single thing.
