Blogcutter's Adventures in Groceryland

Today we made our second pandemic-era grocery trip. I'm pleased to say we are now well-stocked with most things, although the trip was a little more harrowing than last time.

As before, we got there early to take advantage of seniors' hour. This time it took pretty nearly the whole hour to do the shopping.

A number of things had changed. For starters, I did have to line up outside the store, although the wait was a short one. A lot more people were wearing masks, myself included - just a home-made one so not medical quality, but I guess it stopped me from breathing moistly on people and produce!

Then there's the one-shopper-to-a-household rule. For us, that's doable though not ideal (more on that later) - I navigated the grocery aisles while my driver waited in the car reading The Testaments. But what about the single parent with kids who are too young to be left home alone? Under normal circumstances, they might be at school or day care or you could at least phone a babysitter to come to your place and watch them. None of that is allowed these days!

There's also the shop-no-more-than-once-a-week rule. Again, that's feasible for us and in fact, we've been aiming for roughly once a fortnight instead. If we upped it to once a month, we might be inching perilously close to hoardery! But I have many friends who do not have a car or driver at their disposal so they only buy as much per visit as they can carry. I'm sure my resident driver would be willing to take them shopping - but that's now a no-no too!

So anyway, I went bravely into the fray. As mentioned before, I'm not a driver but those humongous shopping carts, if rather unwieldy, do help with physical distancing!

The aisles now have arrows along them, indicating which way you're supposed to go along any particular aisle. In theory, you'd think that might make traffic flow a little easier, but that's not necessarily how it works in practice. If you get to an aisle flowing in the right direction but where you don't need anything, should you go down it anyway (adding needlessly to congestion) to get to the aisle you DO want? Or should you bypass the next two aisles and go down the third one, and just hope you remember to loop back to the aisle you missed?

Now a few words about shortages. The one item on my list I couldn't find AT ALL was flour. Just a sea of empty shelf space where flour should have been. Flour strikes me as a pretty basic pantry staple, unless maybe you've gone gluten-free, but luckily we do still have SOME. Maybe it's down to all those households busily baking bread, ourselves included. Although we do still have plenty of bread around, I'm finding myself doing a Marie Antoinette, saying, "Let us eat cake!" Or at least muffins or cookies?

As for other products, I sometimes couldn't find our preferred type or brand of something, but I at least managed a reasonable facsimile. And I'm pleased to report that they no longer had signs posted in the milk aisle asking us to limit what we bought. So I got a 4-litre bag of milk and a full-sized carton of half-and-half.

When it came time to check out, I noticed a long line-up at the cash, so I asked if any self-checkout stations were available. And there was one, with no waiting. What I hadn't realized at that point was that the one long line-up was actually for three open check-out lanes - the queuing system had changed since last time, when it was still one line per checkout (or actually maybe it wasn't - on that occasion there was no waiting, and we were simply told to go through a particular checkout lane).

So anyway, I went to the self-checkout station with my big full shopping cart and only a few of my own cloth bags. This was when it certainly would have been easier if we'd been shopping as a couple! One person to scan the items, the other to pack. My partner had suggested just wheeling all the groceries out to the car and bagging them there. But I quickly realized that if I did that, I'd be unable to keep track of what I'd scanned and what I hadn't! So I supplemented my cloth bags with a generous supply of the (now free) plastic bags at my checkout station. They're pretty flimsy things and one of them broke before I even got out of the store. I finally got everything scanned, although the silly computer insisted that my bananas were white-flesh peaches! I think maybe I mistook some obscure number on them for a barcode. Once everything was bagged, I wheeled the unwieldy grocery cart outside and through the parking lot (which mercifully was not busy). En route, one of the bags escaped the bottom rack of the cart. I was flustered enough that I probably wouldn't have even noticed. Luckily some kind soul drew my attention to it and I retrieved the bag. Luckily too, it didn't contain eggs or anything breakable or seriously fragile.

We made it home in one piece. Well, two pieces not counting the car or all the bags of groceries we had to schlepp inside.

I'm already thinking ahead to how we should approach things next time. Should we continue with our biweekly schedule? Should we still go up there together but split our list in half and shop with two separate carts in different parts of the store? Some would say that's cheating the system but I see it as more hands make lighter work, enabling us to get out of there in half the time it took me today.

I may just drop Galen a line and tell him what I think.