Grocery Shopping

I just returned from my weekly grocery shopping trip at Vons. Yes, I like to do it on Friday nights with all the old ladies (less rotten children there that way). My friend, Tessa, used to even call it my "granny shopping"! Here are some observations about tonight's trip:

Do you have any idea how much eggs cost? I had no idea they were around $4/dozen! Is this a normal thing, or has there been some sort of chicken epidemic causing the supply to decrease, causing the price to increase?

It breaks my heart to see elderly people (and I mean really elderly - like in their 70s and 80s) grocery shopping by themselves. There was this cute little lady, probably in her 80s, with one of those little scarf things over her head. She was only about as tall as the grocery cart, and she was picking up various packages and reading the labels with a magnifying glass. I wanted to hug her! It especially breaks my heart though to see little old men in the same situation. You know darn well that they came from the generation where the woman did the shopping, and their wife is obviously no longer there to do it for them. They look so lost....like "why are there so many varieties of apples, and which ones do I like?" and "Is there really a difference between generic mayo and regular" (to which, I would say a big, fat YES!)...and then I see them with their little coupons, knowing they're on a fixed income. Oh, I can't go on...it's making me weepy.

Another pricing issue was pointed out to me quite forcefully by a lady who approached me in the produce section. In her hand, she held a bunch of green onions quite forcefully and said, "Do you know that this is only $.01 worth of green onions? And how much are they charging for them?" Now I had just come from the egg section, so I was thinking that maybe they were also charging $4 for the green onions, in which case I'd be appalled! But, since she asked me a question, I looked at the price tag and replied, "They are $.79 per bunch". Not too bad, that's what I would have expected. Then she proceeded to count each onion in the bunch. There were 6. "So that is $0.12 worth of green onions and they're selling them for $0.79!" I was a little confused (she did say only a couple minutes earlier that the whole bunch was one cent worth, and now they were suddenly two cents per onion). She must have seen the confusion on my face because then she said, "I'm from the old school" and walked away. OK, thanks for sharing. $0.79 for green onions didn't seem outrageous to me especially since I just bought the $4 eggs and spent $12 on broccolini for my Thanksgiving dinner! Get a grip, sister...it's $0.79!!

OK, one last thing... why is it that people drive their cart and park it right in the middle of the aisle while they peruse fiber cereal, canned peaches or crackers? Can we not move it over to the side? I don't understand.

I'm done. See...I am a granny. Rachel, we should form a club. Something like "The Thirty-Something 80 Year Old Ladies Club". What do you think?