A revealing trip to the grocery store
Maybe it was pre-storm scrambling for milk and bread, and maybe it was pre-Super Bowl snack procurement – probably both – but a trip to the grocery store yesterday gave me a window to our collective anxious souls.
The store was more crowded than usual for that time of day. I couldn’t find one of those smaller, two-level carts I prefer, and so I had to take a big cart, one with a wonky wheel, which didn’t make itself known until I was three aisles in.
People were grumpy, a mood I first noticed in the produce department. As I was deciding which 79-cent lime to buy (79 cents???), the man next to me was being as discerning and skeptical about the tomato he was holding, and who buys tomatoes in February, anyway?
That’s when the loud family rolled by – a daughter in her 20s, a mother probably my age and perhaps a grandmother driving an electric cart. They had begun a noisy squabble about strawberries, voicing what the rest of us were thinking. Six dollars for two containers of what appears to be dried up and grumpy berries was too much and, as the mother said, they would probably go bad in a day or so.
I did a three-point turn with my cart and headed for dairy. Need I tell you about the egg prices?
We can debate about how expensive everything is, and why: bird flu and tariffs, of course. And if the migrant workers are gone, who will pick the limes and the berries? I thought about buying some raspberries. They were in a single layer in the container for about $6. Some quick math came out to about 50 cents per berry.
The cereal aisle was even more off-putting than usual, and coffee is way up. I can live without the cereal but not the coffee. I rolled my eyes and tossed the can into the cart.
Moving through the aisles I saw people staring at the cans on the shelves. A young man with two small children in the cart was trying to keep them occupied while sorting through packs of chicken, and I wondered how hard it must be keeping a large family well fed these days. I thought about my hefty grocery bills a decade ago when my own kids were growing.
There are lots of other places that capture some of this uncertainty and trouble. A living room with the TV news on is one, and so is a diner booth filled with the usual group of friends talking about politics.
And that grocery store told me a lot, too. People are disappointed and frustrated with how things are, and probably worried about what’s still to come.
The whole thing reminded me of those awful years during the pandemic, when we all were hiding behind masks, trying to read product labels as our glasses fogged up. We connected with each other without smiles or frowns or even much talking. The thing that separated us – the mask – was oddly the thing that brought us together in those public spaces of shared worry and exhaustion. I remember a short conversation with a woman who, like me, was trying to open a plastic bag to put in some apples.
“Hard to do without being able to lick my thumb,” I told her as I scruffled the plastic to open it. She smiled over her mask and nodded.
I finally made eye contact yesterday with the man holding the tomato. He shook his head a bit, rolled his eyes and put the tomato back down. I nodded in agreement.
Different time, different troubles, same old thing.