Newsletter Stories

6/19/02
"A Trip To The Store"

A lot of you might remember the Muffin Cup story from a few months back when Mrs. Cyclerides. sent me off to pick up some muffin cups during the middle of the Superbowl. Well, she must have good timing for her baking episodes as this time she got going in the middle of the NBA Finals and asked me to go pick up a few things at the grocery store. As always I obliged, looked at the list and saw that the juggling act I would have to pull off to take the bike wouldn't be worth the effort. If I had tried this caper it would have made the muffin story look like child's play. So I did the right thing and took the car.

I'll admit, I am not a frequent visitor to the grocery store. So for me, walking into one of these places is like being dropped into a foreign country without a map. I have my list in my hand, I know what I need, but I have no idea which way to go first. And if these stores get any bigger, they are going to need their own zip codes. My favorite place to shop is Circle K. I can stand in the middle of the floor and see every everything. The first item on my list today is peanut butter, so I grab my cart and start cruising the ends of the isles reading the signs trying find something that would relate to peanut butter. I find it interesting that they hang a sign on the end of the aisle that only has 6 clues as to what might be on an isle that actually has 75 items in it. That means, to see the other 69 items, I'm going to have to go down the isle myself and verify that what I want really is not there.

I continue using this method of reading the signs and looking for my clue as to where the peanut butter is, but after walking a 1/4 of a mile, I am getting dangerously close to the end of the store and still no peanut butter. The impending signs of industrial products are starting to shout out, "You've run out of food, ask for help". Finally, I spotted a guy in a red smock that looked as though he might be a fan of the sandwich spread in question. I said, "Could you tell me where the peanut butter is? "He said sure, it is on isle 6. The sign that says Mexican foods, pickles & olives." I said ok, thanks, how could I have missed that? Fortunately I was only on isle 17 and had a short 1/8 mile walk back to claim my first item.

Knowing that I had 12 items left on my list I knew it was going to be a long day. I finally realized that this was not going to be a quick trip and that Shaq and Kolbe were going to have to get it done without me. My next item is a jar of peaches. I'm thinking this is easy, just go to the canned fruit isle and we'll be on to item number three in a snap. Nope, the placement nazis decided to put the JARS of peaches with the fresh fruit, not with the canned peaches. You get the picture. Finally, after many trips back and forth across the store trying to complete my list and seeing the trip meter on my cart hit 14 miles, I am finally done. After all this time spent trying to find my items, I realized that there has really not been a lot of thought put into the shelving of grocery store items. It's like they just started unloading the truck and said, who cares if the ketchup is next to the prune juice? There must be 5 guys in the back room trying to figure out ways to screw us up. I can just see it now, they are having a planning meeting and a guy jumps up and says: "I got it! I got it! Let's put the peanut butter on the Mexican food aisle, they'll never find it there!"

I've come up with a plan that will solve the whole problem and make shopping as easy as ABC. What they should do is start at one end of the store and put everything in alphabetical order so that even casual users like me could pick up a 12 item grocery list in less than the hour that it takes me now. This way, if you needed peanut butter, you would just go to the "P" isle and find it in between the peas and the pop corn. Everyone would have so much time to kill they could put in a Starbuck's and make some extra money.