Grocery Store Mishaps

This is the first year I've done all my own grocery shopping, and I'm now pretty efficient. I can get in and out of the store in under twenty minutes, if all goes well. This week's trip, however, was quite the adventure. Not in a good way. First of all, there was hardly any fresh produce stocked. I don't know why the shelves were so bare this week, considering I went at the same time last week and the selection was fine, but this week? Majorly slim pickins. So, um, what's a recovering anorexic with a serious vegetable-consuming habit and a pathological fear of change to do? My diet literally includes pounds of fresh produce each week, and Grocery Store was not coming through. I ended up buying frozen veggies instead, about which I was less than pleased. Once you've gotten used to the fresh stuff, frozen just won't do. (I'm a recovering anorexic and a food snob, apparently.)

Then I went to the snack food aisle to buy a box of the same brand of crackers that I've been eating for years and years. (Wheat Thins, if you must know.) And what do I discover? No Wheat Thins. None. Not a single box on the shelf. There were a million other brands, all of which I'm sure are comparable, but really? Wheat Thins isn't exactly an obscure brand. Regardless, there were none. So naturally, I was left totally stumped. I paced up and down that damn cracker aisle, picking up a million different boxes and flipping them over, holding two side-by-side to compare serving sizes, calories, sodium, fat, protein, total price, price-per-cracker, price-per-calorie...you get the idea. There was an employee pushing a mop around who made me self-conscious for standing in the stupid cracker aisle for ten minutes, so I finally just grabbed a box and threw it in my cart.

I finally got through the store with all my staples, picked a check-out line, paid, cringed as the cashier stuffed my loaf of bread at the bottom of a bag and slammed my bananas around a little too roughly, and finally made it back out to my car. I drove home, carried all my bags inside, put everything away, and realized that I didn't have any of my frozen vegetables. I had been so preoccupied watching the cashier manhandle my fruit (does that sound dirty?) that I hadn't even put all my bags in the cart. So I grabbed my car keys and ran back outside, heard my front door slam behind me, and instantly realized that I'd left the key to my apartment sitting on the kitchen table. SHIT.

Luckily, I had my phone in my pocket so I called my roommate, who was already on campus. I drove over to get her key, drove back home, got inside and grabbed my key, drove back to drop off my roommate's key, drove back to Grocery Store, found my cashier, learned that my bag was at the customer service counter, ran to customer service, waited ten minutes for someone to dig my veggies out of a freezer somewhere in the back of the store, drove home, threw my veggies in the freezer, rechecked my pocket for my key a million times before leaving the apartment again, and sprinted to class.

I'm STILL flustered after this whole ordeal, twelve hours after the fact. All for some stupid frozen broccoli. I just ate some of it with dinner and you know what? Totally not worth it.