Professional Shopper

Grocery shopping has morphed into an exercise in futility for me in the Big Apple. It's partially attributable to the lack of variety on the shelves or maybe the perverse interpretation of "fresh produce" or maybe it's the general apathy by every employee. Whatever the reason I've been recently intensely yearning to return to the suburbs and drive a gas-guzzling SUV to the local Whole Foods and enjoy the experience once again. That's not to say there aren't Whole Foods or even other healthy and great alternatives abound, but they aren't located up here in Museum country. I just don't have patience for the battle at the grocery store anymore. Now I just enter Morton Wiliams' defeated and surrender to a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter and maybe some grape jelly for my reserve.

Allow me to describe every hungover twenty something's worst nightmare realized. So I wake up a shade before noon with a headache that feels like Shaq was playing basketball with my head and start toward the landfill across the street to pick up some groceries.

I walk up to the door anticipating the automatic doors giving way to the most horrendous produce section in Gotham, but I'm too impatient and wind up walking through the door (maybe I'm still drunk). I make a loop around the edges of this mini grocery store, because I know that the freshest stuff isn't shelved in the aisles. This turns out to be a walk that bears no fruit, both literally and figuratively. I physically manage to choke off the urge to regurgitate last night's light beer and decide that I have to buy something for dinner, because I can't make an entire trip to the grocery store across the street for naught. So I head to the meat section, where I spot this rare species, we'll call her professionalis shopperis.

You can spot her from a mile away. She dressed for the sport, like a midevil knight donning chain mail. She's wearing her slippers, quarter length socks with her stained sweatpants tucked in to said socks, a sweatshirt that was originally white,a cardigan vest, her glasses are perched on the edge of her nose, her hair is concealed by a wrap of sorts, and her wallet dangles from a chain around her neck where she keeps all of her important belongings like insurance card, bus pass, food stamps, etc., and she reeks of moth balls. She doesn't require a store provided cart because she roams the avenues with her own. She leaves her cart in the middle of the aisle as she inspects every aspect of every label of every meat offering that Associated has in stock, to ensure that no other customers can pass. She can sense my blood boil; she knows I'm thinking about the naked silhouette of the girl from last night in order to remain calm, but she doesn't care. It's almost like she wants to pick a fight. My "excuse me" either goes unheard or unnoticed, possibly both. By now she's scrutinizing the weekly circular even though she's spent the morning in her rent-controlled apartment memorizing the dirty pages as if they were the Bible, while watching The Price is Right. She's completely indecisive and is still there long after I've grasped the organic chicken breast package. With elevated blood pressure I try to force things, and make another pass at the fruit to no avail.

Sufficiently depressed and desperately hungover, I consider going to the express lane but see that there is a lengthy queue. A quick scan shows a few registers to the left have virtually no lines, so I dart to one. I look down at my iPod to put on some Tribe Called Quest and when I pick up my head all I can smell are moth balls. I stand in line bobbing my head trying to remain sane, as she unloads four tubs of Cool Whip, eight boxes of Jell-O, one loaf of rye bread, and a tiny jar of spicy mustard. She leans on the credit card machine as the unaffected 15 year old girl with tattoos on her wrists scans the items. This old pain-in-the-ass makes a comment of the price after she sees each price. No problem; I just turn up my iPod and continue reading the GQ while I wait. This woman verbally assaults the poor girl that just wants to move her along so she can text her friends because $6 an hour doesn't even pay for those fly Jordans she wants to buy. As if demonstrating her black belt in Kvetching wasn't enough, she reprimands the teen about the prices quoting the circular. When the employee sets her straight about the actual price, the old woman begins crying foul, "The circular said it was 4 four $1, you can't just deceive the customer." The teen rolls her eyes and tells her the total. This woman got like 32 items for $11.97. I spend more on a single lunch than this woman spent for all of this Jell-O and Cool Whip. She couldn't just swipe a debit card, or hand the girl a twenty. She begged the girl to check her manufacturers coupon on the Cool Whip. Finally, satisfied that she had squeezed every last cent out of the establishment, she paid with a five dollar bill, a food stamp and some miscellaneous coins.

Dear God, grant me the serenity....

What is it? Are they bored on the weekends? Do they get their jollies knowing they didn't over pay for 100 packs of Jell-O? I don't get it. It makes me want to slit my wrists vertically.