I get such a kick out of this place…
Neighbor L said she was going to the biggish town about 35 miles away to visit the Safeway and asked if I wanted to tag along. As it happened, I did.
The only food market in the crappy little town nearest where we live is barely first-world and perpetually seems on the slippery slope to its inevitable demise. The only thing it has going for it is isolation. Since I gleefully embrace that isolation I get into a Safeway maybe twice in a typical year and I always have to fight the impulse to stand in the door with my mouth agape, like I just dropped in from some village in Chad.
America: What a country. Land of glorious excess.
Damned right, it is!
Whenever someone makes fun of someone else and uses the term “First World problems…boohoo” I have to fight the urge to ask them if they’d rather be living in a mud-and-dung hut in some Third World pesthole or would they reather live in a country where we flush our toilets with water cleaner than what 90% of the people on the planet drink?
Bernie will fix that!!!
Although my small town is fortunate to have a much better (family-owned) small grocery store than yours, I still get that “just arrived from Chad” feeling during my occasional visits to Big City Safeways.
Safeway. Costco. WinCo. Even Walmart. More exciting than rock concerts or stock car races!
I think I may need to get a Life.
Long ago, don’t remember who, but someone blogging in Texas (might have been Kim dT), had an exchange student from Russia, picked her up at the airport, stopped by the grocery store on the way home for some items, when the student saw the store and realized it was the norm for here she started crying.
We have Kroger, Food Lion, etc., around here, and I’ve seen the huge grocery/everything else stores in Marseilles, but I was still a little agog a few years ago in Pennsylvania, when I went into a Giant food store. It’s appropriately named. I think I could have got my oil changed somewhere in there, & it’s not a Mall-Wart type place; it’s, ostensibly at least, ‘just’ a grocery store.
Norman, back in the late 60’s, Readers Digest ran a blurb about a Russian woman visiting NYC on some business or the other. Another lady (the author of the story) was tasked with showing her around. They went to various places and the Russian lady “maintained the stoic attitude of ‘Ours is Better”. Then the story lady needed to stop and pick up something from the grocery store on the way back, whereupon the Russian lady fell to her knees and started bawling her eyes out at the sight of all that food for sale to anyone.
I thought the story sounded contrived at the time (and still do), but it illustrates the principle/difference between capitalism v socialism/communism. If I was in a 3rd world s-hole, I’d also be doing my damnedists to get to the USA.