Thursday, November 1, 2007

Stop & Shop, messing with my brain

I went to buy some pommelo and ricotta cheese for my famous fromage d'eau Freedom, a wonderful little dish I made up once when I was high on crack and PCP. I went to Stop & Shop because it was closest, and I could avoid the BU kids at Shaw's.

But it wasn't Stop & Shop. Not anymore, anyway.

Fresh vegetables? Fruit that will still be good when I wake up tomorrow? What is this nonsense? I refuse to believe it's the same store. And in fact I firmly believe that it is not.

They have changed the inside, like a hollowed-out pumpkin that has been replaced by the same pumpkin goo, yet somehow the goo is prettier, maybe a nicer shade of orange. The seeds are tasty, and the guts not so stringy. The plain white candle once placed in the middle has been replaced by fresh beeswax, a fragrant lightsource so novel you'd think it was a Whole Foods pumpkin (and that, I think, is about as far as that metaphor will be stretched). Also, instead of crappy muzak, there was nothing. The hum of the new refrigerators was enough to drive one insane.

It was when I started expecting little old ladies around every corner that I knew where I'd seen this layout - I was in Publix, of all places. They had taken the Florida version and swapped it with the New England one, and that left me without a sense of place, without the comfort of my home grocery store.

They just...they shouldn't do that without some sort of warning, that's all I'm saying.

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