It is not the closest grocery store. There is an associated two street blocks away and we are members of the Union Street Food Cooperative, but I thought it would be cheap and I wanted to take the walk, I have been lazy with getting up in the morning and actually doing my road work so I could use this bit of exercise to make myself feel better.
I like the Coop, for the same reason I despised it at first.
The people.
They are fun to watch in their hippy, grungy, angry little ways. I don’t fully understand yet why shopping here showcases the worst behavior I have ever seen in a grocery store.
It may be the future I saw at Key foods.
Or it could be the ownership aspect.
When you become a member of the Coop, you buy into the store. You pay a refundable membership fee and get to work 2.5 hours at the store every four weeks all for the honor of shopping shoulder to shoulder with the meanest shoppers in the history of marketing.
My wife says it’s because the aisle are narrow. I disagree, though she is the smartest person I have ever met, I really don’t think the aisles are any narrower there than in any other grocery store. It’s kind of like Roller Derbying for food, but instead of skates you have a buggies and we aren’t talking about athletes either, we are dealing with 60ish women that a stiff wind would blow over, running people down to be the next to examine the kale.
My first few excursions I tried to be polite as if I were in some kind of violation of the rules. As if there was something I could do to not feel in the way no matter where I stood, but this was the wrong way to handle the situation.
In fact shopping at the coop was a lot like living in Flushing Queens.
Once the 7 stopped at Main and Roosevelt it was on, people ran for the stairs bumping into each other pushing one another out of the way just to get out of the subway. Out on the street it would get worse, sidewalks crammed full of pedestrians, families walking arm in arm stretched across the entire walk way, people stopping in the middle of the sidewalk to answer phones or to send a text. It was midtown but worse. After a few weeks I decided that there was no use avoiding it and turned on a sort of Godzilla approach to getting home. Nothing could stand in my way that I would slow for. My own rules were straight and sure and take no hostages.
So this is how I shop at the coop now. I do what I need to do and allow the other shoppers the option, run into me with your manic energy, or wait behind me as I chose my kale.
But we didn’t go to the coop and we did not go to the associated, we went to Key Foods and I saw the future.
It started as we stood in front of the watermelon. They were not marked with pricing and the ones cut up looked old and rubbery so we decided to buy a full one, it was heavy and darkly colored, with the telltale yellow patch on the bottom indicating it had ripened and would be sweet and juicy.
I couldn’t wait actually to cut into it and savor the sweet sticky goodness. There is nothing better than watermelon. No fruit can compare.
We walked around the store with it in our buggy putting other items on top of it. It was an essentials only shopping trip. The buggy was not that full. And the experience was a lazy one. The other shoppers were polite. It was like small town shopping, where a four way intersection everyone tries to give the person to their right the go ahead. It was a sweet world, one in which I sort of missed with the many months we had shopped at the coop.
This was until we checked out.
Everything got pushed through the scanner at the self-serve register. We scanned everything without even looking at the price and our “essentials” came out to $30.00 bucks.
Eh, not bad.
Then $6 for a 12 pack of coke, and I thought that sucked, a luxury, the one treat I allow myself and my wife’s soul addiction.
I shrugged and we bagged it up turning to the last item in our buggy.
I picked up the melon and scanned the bar code. The extremely loud voice coming from the self-serve register that yelled our price for each item scanned for the store to hear, asked me, “place the item on the scanner to be weighed.”
I did so and had to blink to make sure I wasn’t seeing something that wasn’t there. $15 for a 10 pound watermelon.
We asked the attendant if this was right. She said, “Yes,” and walked away to help someone else.
We debated taking it off and going without, but after answering our one question the attendant had moved on to the next question, which sent her into the store and she was gone long enough for our patience to be lost causing us to decide to just go ahead and pay for the fucking thing.
I don’t remember melon ever costing this much.
It concerns me.
I not sure why it was so expensive.
I thought about nothing else the entire walk home.
I imagine the watermelon was born on a farm somewhere, so I began with that.
I wondered if just to be a farmer nowadays required a second mortgage, and maybe those loans being taken out on the farms were being defaulted on with not enough produce being sold to pay it back and those farmers are getting squeezed out by the banks and leaving the farms to go wild as no other American can afford to buy the rights to the land.
Less melon farmers means less melons and the price rises.
Then remembered a story I read where there was generational shift away from rural America, where kids were moving into large cities away from farms and small town life. I imagined the funerals of parents with those in line to be the next melon farmers driving in from big cities to attend. Afterward, I imagine, they looked forward to breaking the farm apart and selling it to land developers.
Less melon farmers means less melons and the price continues to rise.
Maybe this melon was an import. So I picture a comfy plane ride for my newly purchased watermelon from some South American country where stuff is actually still grown.
Maybe I am paying for transportation costs with this price, being New York City is not known for its Melon farms this meant my melon did not need to come from out of the country for fuel costs to be included in the price, but maybe as close as Georgia.
I don’t even like owning a car because of fuel costs. So this became a likely possibility why this melon was so expensive.
If I can’t pick it from the ground myself, I have to pay the person who brought it to me and all the costs associated with that trip.
And then I remembered hearing about the almond farmers in California. They tore down generations old almond trees because they could not afford to pay the water bill to keep them alive.
Water!
It’s free. It’s everywhere, but for some reason, this year was less falling from the sky.
Less water, higher water, bills, fewer melons growing, the higher the cost.
With this I saw the future in Key Foods.
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