And like any great plans, it had its birth in a couple of (for me) annoyances that arose from the grocery shopping experience as it happens now.
I have become the de facto family grocery shopper – and actually have been for some time. Please don’t make me turn in my guy credentials; I enjoy it. And over the years, I’ve noticed a couple of trends, especially in the giant grocery stores.
Trend 1: the store layout. When you first walk in the door of a giant grocery store, you typically land in the produce section. And for good reason. Few sections of a major grocery store look as inviting as that sea of colour, freshness, healthfulness and just plain CHOICE! offered by the produce section. There are 15 different kinds of apples, for heaven’s sake!
And yes to a baby boomer this is a big deal! I grew up when you actually got certain fruits or vegetables only at a specific time of year. (Nowadays, of course, the term “winter vegetable” is an anachronism that sits in the same dictionary as “telephone dial”, “clockwise direction” and “channel-changing knob”.)
I can still recall when that fuzzy little camel testicle from New Zealand, the kiwi, made its entrance into the North American grocery stores’ fresh fruit section. Unless you’d actually been to New Zealand, you’d never seen anything like that grubby brown exterior covering a white core interior encircled by a stunningly brilliant lime green donut flecked with its minuscule black seeds. And the taste! A fresh razor-sharp citrus burst that you used to get only from chugging an entire envelope of unsweetened Kool-Aid powder. Suddenly kiwi started turning up in everything from chilled soups through salads to an essential flavour and colour burst atop a glazed fruit flan.
To get REALLY ancient on you, there was a time when the only apple we ever saw an was the MacIntosh, except at Christmas when the sweet five-knobbed Red Delicious would appear in the family fruit bowl for a few miraculous weeks.
Now, you can routinely browse mountains of mangoes and mangosteens, loads of lychees, piles of passionfruit, and the one I love the most – the Cape Gooseberry or ground cherry – each succulent orange fruit wrapped in its own little paper lantern shell with an amazing taste that completely defies description. (Although some have said that it is like eating a perfumed tomato and that’s not too far off my own experience.)
Even the basics like apples, plums and pears now come in so many varieties you can select them for the best flavour matches to whatever recipe you’re preparing.
So... produce. Not too hard to figure out why its rainbow hits you like a Gaugin palette the moment you step inside the door.
And what’s next on your list – milk? But guess where the milk is. Like the Earth’s North Pole relative to its South, milk sits in a dairy section with that other staple – eggs – at the opposite end of the store from produce, forcing you to work across the entire store to get to it.
On your way to the Tru-Taste Skim, depending on the store you may pass through the sections where they are selling books, children’s clothing, snow tires, patio furniture, espresso machines, and at least 50 different varieties of school lunch boxes featuring everything from a Dora the Explorer colour scheme to a separate compartment where you insert a thin frozen gel pack to keep the kids’ cheese sandwiches chilled until lunchtime – wait, didn’t I come into a grocery store?
Trend 2: Can you guess where you’ll find it this time? I first noticed this over a period of several months and related to two specific products: horseradish and ordinary saltine crackers. They kept being moved around! Once I found horseradish in the salad section next to the little bottles of crushed garlic in oil; next time it was in the meat section, with the cold cuts (well, some of the cold cuts. There were also cold cuts to be had in abundance over in the deli section.) And once I found the horseradish nestled in the condiments beside the Maille Dijon mustard, even though it is supposed to be refrigerated.
And guess where you’ll find saltine crackers. Ah – there’s a massive overhead guide sign that includes the word “Crackers”. Hah! Tricked ya! You eat saltines with soup, don’t you? So two aisles over beside the Habitant pea soup with ham is where you’ll find the saltines – with salted or unsalted tops. “Crackers” is reserved for stuff like stoned wheat thins, bacon dippers, melba toast and the countless others in the “snack cracker” family. Beside the soup is where you’ll find the... well, the crackers.
So here’s our plan.
Someone, please, design a smartphone app with a cross-device compatibility that will make iTunes look like a retired carthorse. Its purpose will be simple. It’s for your grocery list. And make it specific. I don’t just mean “tortilla chips”. I mean “blue corn, gluten-free, lightly salted, organic, restaurant-style, bowl-shaped for ease-of-dipping tortilla chips”! And write it so it can be entered on every device you own – whether your desktop PC, your laptop, iPad, smart phone, even your damned Amazon Kindle or Indigo Kobo book reader! And enable an automatic plug-in – or wireless – synchronization that, when you connect two such devices together, will automatically update both to the most recent set of entries.
Now here’s where it gets really cool. You go to the grocery store and the first thing you do when you enter that lush paradise that is the produce section is turn on whatever device you’re carrying – and it automatically synchs to a wireless network in the store and shows you – on your device – a store floor plan. Now you just toggle back and forth from your shopping list to the floor plan – item by item. Those fancy blue corn tortilla chips? Tap it on your list and bang!, your screen shows a little indicator on the floor plan in the correct aisle and approximate position. A truly smart store will also flash up a little callout box that advises: “Old El Paso Blu-Corn Tortilla Chips, 454g special this week”.
Not only that, a truly BRILLIANT program will let you leave your device set almost exclusively on the floor plan as you simply work the aisles end-to-end through the entire store. As you pass “canned low sodium albacore tuna packed in water”, your device will light up with a callout box that says, “This item is on your list. Pick it up, dummy!” (OK, maybe not in exactly those words, but along those lines.)
Now you won’t have to get even mildly annoyed at finding one staple placed so far away from another – you’ll cover off everything on your list in one highly organized pass through the store. In the Deluxe version of this program, as I see it, as each item gets rolled into your cart, you hit a one-touch button of some kind and it is flagged on your shopping list as “Got it”. In the Super Deluxe version, this happens automatically.
So to all the grocery shoppers who, in five years, are going to be fully comfortable with using the latest version of Ubisoft’s “Pimp My Produce”. Remember, you heard it here first. You’re welcome.
= = =
Many years ago, when we as a family were touring the massive Exhibit Hall at the Toronto convention of the annual meeting of the American Library Association (ALA), someone slipped my daughter – then quite young – an advocacy button that read, “Save America’s Libraries”. In short order, we had her responding to anyone who pointed it out to her by saying, “Yes, I’m trying to collect the whole set.”
(Well, I thought it was funny!)
You may recall a couple entries ago I included a photo of Mom’s McLaren’s Whiskey bottle from the long-gone Perth distillery. That is a genuine collectible and some collectors of old glass would happily give it pride of place in their own collections. It prompted me to look around at some of the odds and sods I’ve accumulated over the years with an eye not so much to their eventually acquiring any great value, but more to reflect stuff in which I’ve been interested over my lifetime (so far).
I have a First American edition of Tolkien’s “The Hobbit”. And I stole it. Although “rescued” is, to my mind, the more honest verb. Some 30-plus odd years ago, I was with a group of friends on a resort vacation and the large cabin in which we all were staying had a fireplace. Framing the fireplace was a large bookcase and on the bookcase was this book and, clearly, it had been heavily damaged when some complete moron apparently tossed it into the fire. Even then I was a huge Tolkien fan, having devoured "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Hobbit" each a half dozen times while still a teenager.
Seeing one of his books so badly mistreated almost made me cry and I brought it back with me, thinking it was just an older edition that would be fun to have on my shelf. It was only several years later when, on a whim, I did some research into the particular edition I had salvaged and discovered to my shock it is a first American edition of "The Hobbit", complete with Tolkien's own artwork and maps, and several errors that make collectors weep with joy when they find the edition. (Just one example: two chapters in a row are labelled “Chapter 7”.) In pristine shape, it would be worth a significant pile of money but in the heavily damaged condition this one is, it really is worth more as a curio rather than an object with any inherent value.
At the time, I actually wrote to the Tolkien Society in Oxford, England, because I was thinking of having it rebound. However, they made it clear that they would consider that, even to repair its damage, a travesty and suggested I leave both the book – and the tale of its rescue – intact. However, I did compromise and bought a beautifully published facsimile of the dust jacket of the same edition, and that is how it sits on my bookshelf to this day – badly scorched and beaten, but a first US edition nonetheless.
I also have a wonderful and original program from les Folies Bergère from the inter-war years when Josephine Baker was a featured performer. The program was a gift from my late father-in-law and followed several conversations we’d had about his travels in Europe just before the war. (He had some astonishing colour home movies he shot of a Nazi Party rally in 1937, the main street of the town in which he and some of his friends were staying just festooned with the black, white and red swastika banners. Two years later, Hitler’s armies invaded Poland and WWII engulfed Europe.) One Christmas, I gave him a Baker biography as a gift, prompting him to recall this program and, when he asked if I wanted it, I jumped at it. It clearly is pretty hot stuff for its day!
I have some other things that, to me, are “collectible” simply because I have a personal attachment to them that goes beyond an artificial label like “investment”. I’ve been a voracious reader of all things Titanic going back decades, even before The Woods Hole Institute’s Robert Ballard found the wreck. So when Canada Post this year issued several special commemoratives to mark the 100th anniversary of the sinking, I bought and framed them. One is a sheet of eight overseas first-class letter stamps, and the second is a series of three first-day covers – envelopes with the stamps attached that were cancelled in Halifax exactly 100 years to the day after the ship went down. The cancellation mark is actually a silhouette of a Titanic deck chair recovered at the site of the sinking, and which sits to this day in a Halifax museum. And one of the covers is actually a mount for a special $0.25 coin with a colour image in its face, issued by the Canadian mint.
When Canada phased out the dollar bill (and I’m automatically dating myself by using the term “bill” instead of “loonie” to describe a Canadian dollar), the mint allowed members of the public to purchase actual sheets from the final pressing. I’ve had one framed in something called a “floating” mount that is transparent on both sides. At least we’ll always have at least $40 in the house. (Maybe I should hang a little red hammer beside it and a sign: “In case of emergency, break glass.” With the qualifier that not having enough cash to pay for a delivery pizza does NOT constitute a sufficient emergency!)
“Collectible”, to me, is not something you print on the packaging of a product issued in the millions. Coca Cola is notorious for this. Every month, they seem to issue another “collectible” series of cans commemorating something or other. And of course the recent observance of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee left us awash in “collectibles”, some of them of rather... uh “questionable” taste (a set of masks that casts the Royals as terrifying hollow-eyed zombies leaps to mind as an example).
(That said, you will go far to match in accidental tastelessness a President John F Kennedy commemorative salt and pepper set that was produced by a well-intentioned ceramicist before he was assassinated. The two-piece – of course – set was a representation of Kennedy sitting in his famous White House rocking chair. The pepper shook out from the top rung at the back of the rocker, and the salt – no, I am NOT making this up – from the holes in the President’s head.) Oh lord... I just Googled it. It’s still available. $29 on Amazon.com and it’s a “reproduction vintage” They left out "for sickos" in the ad, I guess.
Collectible for me is something meaningful to me that helps make up the mosaic that is my life. I have, for example, a couple of actual newspapers from July 1969 whose front pages are variations on “Man Walks on the Moon”. I have Marvel Comics’ Conan the Barbarian issues 1, 2, and 3 from the days when I read comics voraciously. I have a Newton and Ridley beer glass from the days when I watched “Coronation Street” religiously -- every Sunday instead of going to church. (The brewery is fictitious; I bought the glass at a celebrity auction here in Ottawa when the actors who played Jack and Vera Duckworth were touring to promote the show. They were the auctioneers and it was a pleasure to emerge the successful bidder on that one.)
Whine o' da week. Home Depot: Why do you have your freight delivery right at the customer exit? The past three times in a row I’ve come out of your store (the one on Innes at the Queensway) I’ve been waved back while a forklift offloads something or other from a giant semi-transport parked right outside the exit door. Most big box stores either have their freight deliveries ‘round back or, at worst (in terms of customer inconvenience) around the side. What rocket scientist decided that a store that receives inventory in massive bundles – lumber, rider lawn mowers, pallets of paint, etc. – should be set up so as to be unloading new inventory right at the same door as customers who just want to exit to the parking lot?
Next time: Whatever. Maybe a ramble about Prince Edward County’s wines and beers – that’s where I’m heading for the next few days. Picton was also Mom’s home town, so it's also a “Roots” trip for me.
À la next time.
No comments:
Post a Comment