HUMAN WRECKAGE
Grocery Shopping in the Time of Coronavirus
Ann is a retired music teacher. To this day she rings in the new year on the Labour Day long weekend. We all receive insidious training through our careers, schools and churches. Ingrained perceptions die hard. I’m retired too. Even as the pandemic calendar becomes something of a blur, there’s still something about Mondays. They will always be blue even if they don’t matter anymore. The habitual dread I always experienced Sunday evenings is now feverish, another weird week ahead.
I generally enjoy shopping for groceries. The industry paid for my post-secondary education. It opened my portal into the world of advertising. Out of the game now, I enjoy scoffing at hopelessly misguided brand extensions such as Heinz mayochup because I can remember sweating the launch of vitamin-infused Diet Coke, doomed from its conception as a healthy alternative to... to something else. Kraft Dinner (KD! in hip, modern parlance) cheese-flavoured powder is now sold separately to add zest to nachos and popcorn, perhaps even Timbits breakfast cereal. When Ann and I travel I enjoy taking stock of the brands populating foreign grocery shelves.
One fine pandemic Monday morning, Ann and I had to go out, our supplies were dwindling. Our dreadful excursion had required as much pre-planning as a heist, a caper. Hand sanitizer? Check. Disinfectant wipes? Check. Gloves? Check. Masks? Fuck ‘em, they look stupid. We agreed we were limited to shopping at one of the two stores we habitually frequent because we were familiar with their layouts. We agreed too that we’d be on a clock with no time to closely examine the fruits and vegetables we wished to buy or debate the merits of an impulse purchase.
The tragic flaw on display every day in your average grocery store is that its configuration allows customers to shop the perimeter and stay out of the aisles where the larger margin goods are shelved. The irony is that the industry’s accepted model of traffic flow actually impedes consumer spending, hinders the acquisition of those profitable incremental dollars.
We agreed upon a store. Ann wrote down a shopping list, broken down by department and designed to minimize our forays into the narrower internal aisles. All I really wanted were a few boxes of facial tissue. I assume the major paper companies have retooled their mills to concentrate on the production of toilet paper, but in my case they’ve no idea how much snot resides in a human head. We understood that our grocery list was something of a fantasy, a child’s letter to Santa fated to a Rolling Stones reply.
When I was a student doubling as the relief produce manager at the A&P on rue Ste-Catherine near the Montreal Forum I always chuckled at the weekly chaperoned visits from the Soviet consulate delegation. I read spy thrillers then and I still read them now and so I assumed half the group operated as KGB agents. How many cultural attaches does an evil empire bent on global domination really need? And all that delighted Cyrillic chatter about capitalist excess and abundance, happy sounds because maybe in the 70 years following the Russian Revolution political assassination, genocide and a succession of failed Five Year Plans hadn’t brought much to a kitchen table in Moscow, Petrograd or Kiev.
Lately I’ve been counting weeks by the Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle, 15 squares across and 15 down the grid. Precision. Order. But, oh God, Monday came again as it will and it must, and with it, our COVID-19 mission. As we made our final preparations to depart the Crooked 9, I recalled my A&P cold warriors and their plum Canadian postings. Ann and I were headed out to shop an under-supplied, picked-over grocery store with traffic control arrows taped on its floor, aisles closed off, and perhaps a queued delay for entry. How Soviet can we go? I’d sneered and sneezed at those Russian strangers; all I wanted this Monday morning was a couple of boxes of Kleenex.
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