- In an odd twist of fate, I ended up inside a Safeway the other day. Not a big deal, you say? For me, it was. Looking back, it has likely been close to a year since I’ve set foot inside a Safeway. It’s not that I don’t grocery shop; I do. But I shop elsewhere: either Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, or Rainbow Market here in teh city. 
Though it has been a conscious decision to shop at these other, um, shops, I made no specific decision to avoid Safeway. It was just a consequence. So, having decided that I’d like a 6 pack of spud lite, I pulled the Benzo into to the Webster Safeway, one of those rarest of places in San Francisco where you encounter a plethora of extra, empty parking spots. Spooky.
Upon entering, and knowing the layout of this store from prior experience, I headed straight fer the cold beverage aisle. Found me an on-sale brand of fermented barley and hops, and turned back to the front of the giant store, to a checkout line.
It was there that I began to take note of the radically different experience I was encountering. That particular cross-section of fitness, celeb, home-making, and tabloid magazines; that cold fluorescent lighting, reflected back upon the cheap white/speckled linoleum; candy and gum. Then, placing my beer on the checkout belt, the ad-infused food separator caught my eye, along with all of the rubber-trimmed formica surfaces. As I made it to the front of the line, I looked up and saw that there were about a dozen other aisles, replete with similar checkers and baggers, all fitted in the corporate blue polo shirts under brown aprons, all looking about the same age and weight, wearing similar hair styles and of among a particular range of ethnic backgrounds.
It was a shocking moment. I quickly recalled the oddly selected group of products that face you at a Trader Joe’s checkout line, or the batch of weirdos working at Whole Foods on any given day; the gentle lighting, the presence of human beings among the food aisles, and the general sense of humanity that my (now) regular grocery shops offer, and was stricken by the antiseptic, off-putting, and basically android style of these grand grocery stores.
It was an odd experience – mostly because stores like Safeway were all I knew for most of my life. I actually remember the first time I walked into a Whole Foods (in San Diego) and being blown away by the beautiful concrete floors, the natural color palette, and a general sense of luxury. Or a long-ago first visit to Trader Joe’s, when I thought to myself, “what a weird store”. Today, the story has changed, and it is the old style which I find odd, and WF and TJ’s that I am accustomed to.
It’s funny how out expectations can change and how the once quotidian experience can morph into ‘ewwwww’.
I too can’t stand those cold florescent
lights! The uniforms spell out “conform’! Yet you can see the effort (on the part of the checkers) to be different. Will they ever learn how boring sameness is?