The Colour of the Supermarket

I open my pantry and stare into it. The only thing staring back at me is a jar of stale, faded red lentils and a few packets of dried sauce mixes. My shelves are as cold and lifeless as the winter dreariness outside my kitchen window.

I check the refrigerator for a little inspiration. A few shriveled carrots. Some limp celery. Half a bottle of tomato juice. Some green olives. Not many survivors here otherwise. So what will it be for dinner tonight? Lentils with carrot shavings and parmesan sauce? Olives with what I suppose is a cream sauce for boiled beef and root vegetables? Hmm…

Blah!

I’ve just lost my appetite. I feel colourless. I decide a trip to the supermarket is in order. It’s just three minutes away—through the apartment complex’s courtyard and past a few nail and hair salons, then across the busy street. The worst part is bundling up against the cold for the six-minute total journey. Meanwhile, with all the layers on, I’d roast like a Turkish kebab once inside the overheated supermarket.

I grabbed two reusable shopping bags and secured my muffler around my neck to the point of choking, then I left the comforts of my warm apartment.  Outside in the stinging cold, my nose caught the pleasant aroma of someone preparing Sunday lunch. It was like onions sautéed in butter and the bouquet of it warmed me through the courtyard.

By the time I got to the busy street, I was adjusted to the shock of the cold. I waited for both cars and trams to clear the way before crossing. It was like playing double jeopardy to dodge both cars and an oncoming tram at the same time. Kudos to the clever survivor who makes it across! A few other apartment dwellers, bundled up like North Pole explorers, are also heading in the same direction. They’d brought their shopping bags and little carts with wheels. Who would get there first? The game was afoot! I walked quickly at the first break in the traffic. The others waited cautiously; they weren’t willing to chance it before the UPS van could run them down. It was cold and I just hated being out in it when I could be home instead. I just wanted my shopping done so I could return to a steaming hot cup of tea at home base. I liked to play a little game to make it all the more fun. I imagined I was on a major race against time and I needed to get home before the sky fell down—which was likely to happen anyway, given the snow flurries in the forecast. Knowing my luck, there’d be paparazzi of snow falling by the time concluded my mission and walked back out of the store. I beat the other shoppers to the opposite sidewalk by several seconds and stared back at the colourless block of flats. If this had been a competition, I’d have won a gold medal. So there’s the colour I was looking for.

Turning my glance away from the block of flats, I looked up at a billboard advertising a local shopping mall. It had a caption underneath a very dolled-up model which read “Unexpected shopping”. By now, the two other shoppers had made it to the median and were poised to cross the other half of the street. I turned and dashed up the stairs of the building housing the supermarket., glided through the sliding doors as they parted to welcome me, and slipped down the escalator to the supermarket below. I don’t need a shopping cart. Those are for the old ladies and families with screaming toddlers. A handbasket would suffice. Unlike supermarkets back home in my country, stores here are a one-way street. You can’t really begin anywhere but at the entrance closes to the shopping carts. There’s a course they want you to follow. This store has you start at the produce. Bins of fresh fruit and vegetables gleam, strategically placed at such a level as to attract shoppers like me who had a “vague” shopping list; that is, customers who enter the store without a clear picture of what it is they want to buy and come out with shopping bags full of surprises. Maybe that’s what the billboard was referring to.

Fresh, gorgeous green broccoli from Italy was the first to snare me. It was also on sale, so I bought two of them. I’ll find a use for them. An old man with precious little hair left, using his shopping cart as a walker, farted on ahead of me, blocking access to the carrots. He’d picked up two kapia-variety sweet red peppers and was placing them on the scale, hoping by some miraculous feat the machine would just spit out the price sticker. But if you don’t check the box you won’t get what you want. I showed him the picture on the screen corresponding to a red pepper. Touch the picture and—voila!—it spits out the price. He grumbled a sort of ‘thank you’, put the peppers in his shopping cart, then shuffled back for more vegetables. I was going to buy carrots but the old Shuffleduffer was blocking them. Rather than waste anymore time at this station—by now the shoppers from my block had entered the building and were coming down the escalator—I opted instead for a bag of bulk carrots. They were already bagged and priced and within my reach. Now I was ahead of the old man.

At the cold cuts refrigerator, a girl of about ten or eleven was chattering away with her mum. The girl had on bright red, dangling strawberry earrings. She did all the talking, grabbing whatever she pleased and justifying it with her cute, clever and witty charm. Then she’d distract her mother by getting her to look at bottles of pineapple juice neatly stacked on a center display table while she surreptitiously slipped two more sweet breakfast bars into the cart from the breakfast cereal display opposite. Her mom barely noticed, mumbling at everything the strawberry-bedecked chatterbox had to say. I decided she was probably used to the non-stop talk. I, on the other hand, quickly grew tired of the girl, so I grabbed whatever lunchmeat looked reasonably good and threw it on top of the carrots.

A life-size cardboard cut out of Jamie Oliver stood grinning between the bread and the meat counters. Beside him, a display of various kitchen knives, all boxed up and ready for sale, sat poised and waiting for customers who had the twenty stickers needed to purchase one of the knives for a small price. I could hear Jamie in his Essex drawl: “Guys! I’m really excited about my new line of exquisite kitchen knives!”

As I move past the meat counter, I take captive a package of chicken breasts and then make a beeline for the cheese and yogurt section. By now, the Shuffleduffer has finally graduated from produce to breakfast items, and the shoppers from my block were getting sucked into colourful displays of bananas, avocados, and vine-ripened hothouse tomatoes. I picked off a few yogurts—two flavoured and one plain—because hey! Throw me a fricking banana here, I need breakfast, too. I didn’t want to reduce myself to the sweet stuff Chatterbox was conning her mother into buying.

Next, I sail past the dried foods, picking up more red lentils to replace the sorry collection back home. I also grab some bow-tie pasta because I want to live La Dolce Vita too, as suggested by the picture on the package of a Vespa with two lovers on back whizzing past the Colosseum in Rome. While I was in Italian mode, I quickly skim over to the frozen food section to grab a pizza. If I’ve learned one things in life it’s to always keep at least one frozen pizza on hand at all times.

The finish line was just ahead of me. I could hear Chatterbox droning away somewhere in the canned food section. Her mum was always silent. Poor woman. Old Shuffleduffer was puttering past the tea and coffee, having left the breakfast cereals in his cloud of dust for the other shoppers from my block. They were now officially in last place. Inevitably I pass the junk food section as I enter homestretch to the finish line. There’s a mysterious magnetic field in junk food sections of supermarkets, rather like the Bermuda Triangle. Anything coming near it gets sucked right in. As I pick through the myriad choices of potato chip brands, trying to choose which one to poison myself with, I hear the loud-mouthed, grumpy checkout woman whose line I’ve passed through before bellowing at a customer for leaving his basket on the conveyor belt. Not wanting to be berated upon for anything today, I decided to avoid her line.

Back to snacks, I finally selected a spicy-hot, locally-produced potato chip. Not only local and cheap but also I found the short list of ingredients impressive—all of them I could read and realise had not been created artificially in the laboratory.  That’s the thing with globalization. Well, many things, actually. You see it everywhere. Like glucose syrup (instead of natural sugar) you see globalization everywhere. I see the same commercially-produced snacks here I see in every other supermarket in the city and in every country I’ve been to. I don’t know where anything comes from anymore. Is it from Germany? Is it American? Slovak or Chinese? I love my Serbian tomato juice, which, by the way, I picked up another bottle of in the produce section. It was next to the pineapple juice. Oh, and it comes in glass bottles, too, not just another throw-away Tetra-pak which harms the biosphere as much as it renders the flavour totally flat. Hooray for the Serbians! This is one product not yet touched by the hand of globalization.

Armed with two sacks of my sinful snack, I make a final stop—at the beer and wine section. Hey, life’s hard and I gotta drink. Finally, I was at the finish line. I chose a much younger but enormously chubby checker woman. She was slower than frozen Siberian molasses, but at least she was polite. I don’t expect stellar service—to do so in this country would lead to bitter disappointment. But instead I’m content to be greeted and not get yelled at for something stupid. More importantly, I don’t want to be ripped off at the register. As Chubby Checker Woman’s working to ring me up, a middle-aged man brings in a shopping bag filled with groceries from a competing store, showing it to the security guard on duty before allowing himself to enter the store. Good call on his part. Once I was busted for bringing stuff into a shop I’d bought elsewhere. I ended up having to pay for it—twice. Oh yeah, and be sure to keep your receipts. I’ll never bring in groceries from another store again.

So now I’m in damage assessment:

-two heads of broccoli

-a package of bulk carrots

-a package of chicken breasts

-three containers of yogurt

-a bottle of tomato juice

-a package of red lentils

-a package of bow-tie pasta

-one frozen pizza

-two sacks of spicy potato chips

-two bottles of lager beer

     Total damage: twenty-three euro and seventeen cents. And I earned stickers towards the purchase of one of Jamie Oliver’s knives, too.

I thank Chubby Checker Woman, putting the receipt in one of two bags I’d carefully packed with groceries and wave goodbye to Jamie Oliver. Chatterbox and her mother enter the line after the customer behind me. I lost track of Shuffleduffer and the other two shoppers from my block.

I rode up the escalator and as I stand poised to cross the busy street I glance back up at the “Unexpected shopping” billboard. I’d managed to behave myself quite well in there. However, now my mind raced with ideas of what to prepare for dinner. Chicken with yogurt sauce? Pasta with sautéed broccoli? The possibilities are endless! Suddenly the block of flats towering in front of me across the street didn’t seem to lack any colour after all.

 Original draft written: January 21, 2018