I live in a very tiny little town in Hunterdon County, New Jersey. I always say it’s like living in a modern day version of Mayberry RFD (yes, that dates me, remember Andy and Opie?) and it’s a great place to live, but sort of retro and often feels like we live in the 1950s.
SO, the big doings around here this month is that the local Shop Rite is re-modeling, and expanding into 2 additional storefronts so that it will be a lot larger. It’s taking a while and in the meantime, everything is moved all around and there are incorrect signs so no one can find anything, and carts are bumping into each other, people are wandering around looking puzzled and there is general mass confusion every time I walk in there. A normal Shop Rite visit on the weekend used to take me 45 minutes for a full weeks shopping. Now…..it takes me almost 2 hours and the visit is filled with drama.
Everyone in the store is highly indignant about the whole thing. No one can find a thing. They’ve moved stuff all over the place and it’s like finding things in a maze now and the locals are NOT happy. I personally think the whole hubbub is hilarious!
It’s turned a normal, mundane weekly grocery shopping trip into a big social thing. Today as I wandered around trying to find the Ice Cream (some things never change), I came upon 2 couples in their early 40’s discussing their dismay at their total inability to find anything in the store since the re-arranging. I heard one of the wives say, “I mean, we’ve been coming here for 10 years, and everything was always in the same place, and now we can’t find anything. I think they did it on purpose to make us buy more things.” The 4 of them looked like they had been standing there talking for a while, and were still there when I found my Haagen Daz vanilla ice cream gallon, and left to go search for the bread aisle. Every aisle offers a new opportunity to converse with some other stranger and ponder about your respective inability to find things. Wasn’t the pasta down this aisle last week? Who decided to put the cat food across from the candy?
The amount of planning behind this thing is akin to the storming of Normandy. There are store personnel roaming all around trying to be helpful, directing people, giving out maps with lists of where things are. Food is stacked everywhere, stuff seems to move from one aisle to the next, and then to another the next week, for no apparent reason. There are announcements over the loud speaker, telling shoppers that the management is sorry for the inconvenience and thanking all of us for our patience.
I’m finding the whole thing immensely amusing. For some reason it isn’t bothering me at all. I find stuff like this doesn’t get to me these post Breast Cancer days – I’m actually loving it and the fact that my funny little bucolic town is so flummoxed by it just makes me smile at human kind. Where else but in America, would we all be so annoyed at a store for giving us more choices? Enjoy your weekend.
This comment has been removed by the author.
That’s funny, Claudia. People HATE change! Joe would LOSE it in that place–he loves to dash in, find what he wants and dash out immediately. Daddy was that way, too–on a mission. Cracks me up. Me–I’d probably relish in the new things I’d never noticed before and the people I’d never met before. Just think how nice it’s gonna’ be when it’s all done, I guess.
(I deleted my first comment when I saw a major typo; sorry!)
xo
Reminds me, too, of our Walmart–or, as Joe calls it, the KMart. They are also evidently expanding, and it used to be that you could go completely around aisles on either end. Now, you go down one aisle, and it dead-ends at the wall, so you have to maneuver your cart around and turn around in each and every aisle. People are freaked–“where’s the toilet paper?” “What’d they do with the Ponds facial cream?” I think it’s a ploy; a big conspiracy to keep us in there forever, never to escape. Hell=eternity in Walmart/Kmart.
LOL, everyone seems to think it’s a big retail conspiracy – I think it’s just their way to expand and give us more options! So funny. XOXO Say hi to Joe for me.
Hi Claudia,
I am catching up on all of your blogs. What fun! Love the photos and your insightfulness. Your stories remind me of those Norman Rockwell paintings…you take the time to observe the ordinary, only to find that it is extraordinarily humorous! Well done!
XXXXX Jean XXXXXXX
hahahahaha! My laugh of the day!
A gallon of Haagen Dazs? Is that for the week? Do you share?
Hysterical post. I imagine the coupon folks must be even more upset than most,
at not being able to find their items!
Hi Lisa and Angela – I DO share. Mostly, the ice cream is consumed by my 13 year old son, but I also happen to love Haagen Daz vanilla, so amazingly creamy. 🙂