Our local grocery store of choice is in the process of remodeling. This is sort of a big deal in our happy little home, because Earl does the majority of the grocery shopping for our home and he has a certain way of doing it. I dare not blame this certain way on the fact that he’s getting older, I just like to think that’s he very well organized in all facets of his life and these organizational skills manifest themselves throughout everyday tasks.
The local market was originally built to be a combination of a grocery store and one of those warehouse type places. When it was in this configuration, all the aisles went the wrong direction: looking into the store from the front, the aisles ran left to right instead of front to back. This used to throw us both off but at the time it was better than the option across the street, where the aisles ran at 90 degrees to each other but at a 45 degree angle to the front registers, hence a bunch of “V”s. We couldn’t handle that, so we dealt with the back and forth aisles instead.
When the warehouse concept failed, the market was reconfigured into your standard supermarket, albeit kind of big. The roominess of the building was appreciated though, because it felt very open and airy and you could fit three carts across in an aisle and not worry about Edna and Beatrice blocking the aisle since they were usually chatting to one side.
With this latest remodel they are reducing the size of the store by nearly 30,000 square feet. The place is in shambles and it feels cramped. They’ve eliminated the “Nature’s Place” section where they had healthy alternatives for the crap that they hock elsewhere. The gourmet cheeses, the salad bar, all gone. For all intents and purposes, this supermarket is in the process of becoming your average, run-of-the-mill grocery store with nothing remarkable about it, except for one thing: their prices are still a little higher than the competition’s. Since there’s no reason to pay premium prices without a premium experience, I decided to introduce Earl to another market in the other direction from home.
Here is my husband investigating his new marketing digs.
Overall, the experience was a success and I made a promise that I would try to start accompanying Earl on these shopping excursions. Honestly, I wish that we had a Wegmans in the area, but alas we don’t, so we make do with what we have.
