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I love to shop for food. Clothes shopping? Yuck. But food! I can spend hours looking at merchandise.
Walking through the aisles can be stress-relieving for me. Just seeing the products, demystifying the marketing strategies of product placement and packaging design, or coaxing out the most favorable deals at the best value. It all entertains me.
Yes, shopping for food is the primary reason to visit a market. But when I take time to examine even my earliest memories of shopping for food, I see layers upon layers of wonder and learning.
You might think shopping for food is all about getting the right price. But price is just one reason we shop where we do. Have you ever thought about why you shop where you shop? I sat down one day to think about it. Really, I did! Grabbed a cup of tea and a notepad, even.
Grocery stores have always been much more than just a place that sells food. When I think about it, some of my earliest lessons about people, money, and independence happened between the produce section and the dairy case. The grocery store has long held a key place in my life.
As a little girl, grocery shopping with my mom, a nurse, was a social service encounter of the highest kind.'Running to the store for some milk' could easily, and often, turn into an hour or two service call for whoever was shopping at the same time as we were. It was as though the store announced us before we entered, "Attention Shoppers: Jo has parked her car and is walking in." Because as soon as we walked in,someone approached Mom with a health question or update. And if Mom saw one of her patients from the clinic, she would routinely ask about their health and the well-being of just about everyone in their family. She stayed connected because she cared. There was no such thing as a quick trip to the store with mom.
Shopping by myself as a young adult on a limited budget was a test of maturity. A milestone, really. Living away from my family gave me the opportunity to make my own food choices; and I can assure you, liver and onions were never served in my house.
Shopping with my children was, and still is, a favorite experience. The grocery store was our playground. I made it a game, not a chore. I'm pretty sure I could have homeschooled them inside a grocery store: social studies, biology, language, home economics, math, geography, even orienteering. After all, learning the layout of your favorite grocery store is an important life skill that translates perfectly outside the store's doors.
Letting them go on their own scavenger hunts for specific items was always fun for them. When the kids were young, these hunts would occur in the same aisle I was in. As they aged and grew in independence, they could venture further from me; terrifying for me, exciting for them. During one such hunt, my daughter discovered that rice vinegar was priced differently in the oils & dressings section than in the specialty/world food aisle. She got extra credit for that one!
I’d even give each child an assignment. Coupon in hand, they’d need to find the item, sometimes using the store map, then determine if using the coupon was worth it. What fun it was to see their faces light up when they discovered that each brand might have different amounts of food inside, thus debunking the illusion of saving money.
Shopping can be a perfect venue to reinforce thoughtfulness, gratitude, politeness, even right of way traffic laws. Grocery carts have their own rules of the road, you know. To this day, I'm still uncertain which aisle yields to the other.
Later, shopping without children became something else entirely. It became a social occasion. This was my time. Bumping into friends, old and new, can be an unexpected chance to catch up. Whether shopper or staff, the opportunities to make connections are endless.
Funny how we can so easily discount the opportunities available to us, sometimes in the most innocuous of places. Until I sat down and thought about it, I had never considered how much of my life had taken place between the aisles.
The grocery store was never just a place to buy food. It was where my Mom connected with people. Where I learned independence. Where my children learned about the world. And where, all these years later, I still occasionally run into someone I haven’t seen in decades.
Maybe that’s the thing about ordinary places. We keep returning to them, and without realizing it, our lives accumulate there.
So, the next time you’re standing in the grocery aisle, look around. You might find more than what’s on your shopping list. And maybe that’s why I don’t mind when a quick trip to the grocery store takes a little longer than planned.
Sometimes, we’re not just buying milk