Next Time I'll Order In

One of the first questions I have came to me on a recent trip to the grocery land called Wegmans. For starters, I had a hard time adjusting to the store when I first moved here. It is like the Epcot of grocery stores, I can travel to a land of all cheese and then walk over to the world of organic everything (including clothes). And if all my traveling works up an appetite, I can choose anything from Indian food to pizza and head upstairs to eat it and watch everyone else shop. What I especially adore is the random sushi stands or sample ladies blaring Bob Marley. I just know that when he was writing those songs he was thinking of middle aged suburbanites shopping in the organic aisle, talking on their cell phones, wearing hiking attire from REI.

But that is not my question. My question comes from the new carts that I recently found there. What I want to know is, how do I attain the power over people to make them believe that whatever it is I show them, must be better than the perfectly good product they had before. The cart I pushed around last Tuesday made all the progress I had made toward walking into Wegmans without a panic attack disappear.

I will start with the anatomy of the cart. These people have taken the idea of the big basket to push groceries around in and cut it in half. Now, I am to push a cart with a small half-basket on top and a four foot long basket on bottom. Both baskets being too shallow to stack even a loaf of bread on top a carton of eggs. I am fairly short, coming in at 5'3", and so to maneuver something that long causes some difficulty. At one point, I got pinned in the produce section after my boyfriend made a sharp turn. I was looking around panicked for a safe route out, but everywhere I turned there were more long carts and kids running and women pretending not to notice me even though I was summoning my boyfriend in our secret phrase of "ca caw" to let him know I was stuck. Eventually he heard me and came back to help. Needless to say I was on pushing probation from then on.

The next problem I have I touched on briefly already, it is the fact that nothing can be stacked in the carts anymore. Have people gone so completely germ and disease nuts now that their food cannot even touch while still in the packaging? That really is a silly question and can be answered simply by looking at the handle of the cart. Yes, the new handles are actually special handles that repel bacteria. Whoever invented this one is laughing in his money somewhere. Apparently the sanitary wipes provided at the entrance aren't enough to ward off all the dirt and grime that resides inside a Wegmans and bacteria repelling handles are needed. Whenever I first read this, I was slightly apprehensive about holding the handle. To just look at it, it seems like a normal plastic handle. That is why it scares me. I do not know if something in the handle melts the bacteria away or if there are some type of radio active waves that zap the bacteria in the air. Either way, I wanted to break out a pair of gloves to protect myself from it, but I didn't want to embarrass my boyfriend so I faced my fears and took hold.

When it was finally time for check out, I was left alone to check out with the mutant cart while my boyfriend went to the bathroom. The first problem I had was the fact that the new carts are now wider, leaving only millimeters to spare on either side. Once I got the cart into the aisle, I realized that I could only reach the three items on the top shelf of the cart. I then had to back the cart out of the aisle and back it in to reach the items on the bottom shelf, all the while the 17 year old with perfectly messed hair was staring unapprovingly at me and the woman in a hurry to go somewhere (Everyone out here is always in a hurry yet there's never anything going on. Someday I strive to find out where they're all going.) was huffing up a storm. My problem again with backing the cart in, was the shear length of it. I could not reach over and grab the top shelf without catching my ankles, which was sure to end in me on the floor, so I had to bend over and grab the bottom shelf and waddle myself, butt in the air, backwards into the aisle. Once I was finally able to unload the cart, I had to then waddle the cart even further out the back end of the aisle so I could get behind it to swipe my card.

My boyfriend walked out of the bathroom to find me sweating and shaking. The woman who was behind me shook her head at my sorry excuse for a Wegmans shopper on her way out.

If these carts are to make my life easier, maybe grocery shopping is not for me after all.