Life as Crisis Management: The Grocery Store Kiada

There are a lot of things I really don't enjoy doing. I don't like going to the laundromat. I really wish I lived somewhere that had laundry facilities on site. I don't like cleaning the toilet bowl. Mom, why did you not tell me that I would be cleaning crap from toilet bowls for the rest of my adult life? And I don't like shopping particularly when there are hordes of other people shopping at the same time. And that is why I try to shop earlier in the morning or later at night.

Today was one of those days when I did some shopping in the early am hours on a rainy Sunday that felt a lot like Cambridge, England. I needed to pick up some groceries, I needed to get some medications, and I needed to fill my gas tank up with some petrol before petrol prices start rising again thanks, in part, to cartellisation and speculation, both inherent aspects of modern capitalism. So around 8 am I got in my car and headed off to the Delmar Hannaford and the Glenmont Walmart.

Both stores reminded me about two of the things I really detest about shopping for groceries and medications. I had a coupon for ten dollars off at Hannaford. It was one of those coupons where if you buy $25 dollars or more worth of items you get a $10 dollar discount. Among other things I wanted to pick up some Siggi's Honey Yoghurt, which I like very much and which was on sale at Hannaford.  So I went to the yoghurt aisle and guess what? Yup, the Delmar Hannaford did not have any Siggi's Honey Yoghurt on the shelves. Nor was it on the cart that the person stocking yoghurt had out so he could fill the empty yoghurt shelves. As I didn't want to wait on a check of stock in the back I decided to skip the yoghurt--the other varieties did not appeal to me--and pick up enough other items so I could make the amount needed so I could get the coupon discount.

My experience at Walmart was a bit different from that of Hannaford. I managed to find most of what I wanted at the Glenmont store even if I had to do a bit of searching for several items, something I almost always have to do at Walmart. The Equate Alka Seltzer was a bit hard to find since they recently moved it for some reason. Walmart seems to like to move stuff once you have found out where it is. Something else that was recently moved and I wanted to find at the Glenmont store was the Beyond Meat burgers, which I like very much. I went to where they were the last time I was at Walmart a few weeks ago but lo and behold they were nowhere to be seen. It was like they had been raptured. Giving up, I went to the self checkout in the store. Seeing an employee there I asked him where it was and was told to look on A32. Unfortunately,  I could not find aisle A32 or even the signage for aisle A32. As I did not want to continue looking for the Beyond Meat burgers--I had perishable frozen items in the car from Hannaford--I gave up and went home.

Stupid me you see I had forgotten about the rules of one of those many variants of Murphy's Law. I had forgotten that generally speaking when you want to find something in a mega grocery store or department store with their labyrinthian aisles and their items sometimes on the move you won't be able to find what you are looking for because the item you are looking for is out of stock, not on the shelves, or you can't find the aisle it is supposed to be in. And so it goes.