Super Markets Lose their Super and their Market Status

What's left? A bunch of lying, theiving, over worked, underpaid, conniving, manipulating, polluting opportunists who we look to with blind trust to provide our families with good nutrition and appropriate meals.

It's midnight, I can either dye the roots of my hair, or I could blog and I have some ammunition that I can blog about when it comes to supermarkets. I think my roots will just have to wait until the morning.

I walk into my supermarket and the first thing I notice is that all the cashier's backs are to the windows. After being shot in a store clerk robbery in the States many moons ago, I swore I'd watch how close to the windows a store will position it's cashiers. Call me a fatalist, but I survived the madmaxness that was Los Angeles in the 70's and 80's.

Back to the store... When I walk to the right, the produce is displayed in ways that you need to root through it for the organics even though there is an organic section. Lots of things with bad fats and empty calories are everywhere I look, from designer goodies to the traditonal 'bean dip'. I try to zero in on the few things that I want and not look around as that would mean that I start off on a tangent in my mind about what people are eating and why.

Being a closet sociologist has its price because I can turn a shopping trip into a psychosocial scientific analysis gathering event in a New York moment if I see someone exhibiting health traits that indicate a compromised immune system and then see that their food choices supports why they are sick. Hard to remember what I've come in for at the best of times, but if I get caught up daydreaming about what I see in other people's carts, I sort of wander aimlessly selecting things I didn't know I needed.

On the other hand, I'm scrupulous about labels because I just FEEL so much better when I haven't had any high fructose corn syrup, compared to when I've fallen off the wagon and imbibed in that innocent treat. I just quit that battle altogether. I will carefully select products that I feel are relatively guilt free and move to the cash. Then, when the clerk rings up my produce, I notice that the prices at the produce are in pounds, while the scale and screen at the cashier has the prices in kilograms... and I think that not only are they manipulating us to want empty calories and horrendous toxic products passing as food, but now they are trying to befuddle the customer, who, in shopping in amidst a hustle of strangers, is already somewhat befuddled. They pack stuff at eye level, hide RFID chips in packaging, scan you as you pass certain areas, picking up information from products on your person. Then the clerk gives you three cents back because you brought your own bags and swipes your points card where they are saving you money to miraculously allow you to cash it in at future dates for products from their store.

Would it be asking too much to have a market where things come from nearby and in season, and organic? Would it be asking too much if prices were consistently what they were? Or that baby food not be within 50 feet of caustic detergents and petroleum products? Or that employees were treated with respect and not harrassed, stressed and made to feel inadequate for not doing the jobs of two people for the salary of one?

I shop selectively around town as I learn of merchants who are straight with me, who provide lots of good organic food and who are conscientious and sustainably minded when it comes to how the food gets from the source to my table. I try for close to home and then I botch up all that reserve by buying a five lb sack of seedless black grapes that I know came from halfway around the world, still dusted with the malathion that is the pesticide (grapes are the most heavily pesticided fruit out there apparently).

Ah well, I'm a leather shoe'd, part time vegetarian who is bound to spontaneously change at any given notion. And I can pretend to wash the grapes. Sometimes I freeze em. But its my last weakness...