Supermarkets and I haven’t been on good terms since about 1975 when I was deeply traumatized by a “Safeway” supermarket at the age of 16. It was my first real job. I had harvested various berries before that, which required that I get up totally way too early and moreover paid not by the hour but by flat of berries harvested, which really sucked, and I had worked at my uncle’s pizza parlor, a job I resigned from voluntarily, I remember, after it became obvious even to me that it was going to take me longer to adjust to the concept of “work” than was fair to my uncle.

Safeways was hiring a bunch of boxboys and other people for a new grand opening. Bagging groceries is stupid, and I soon observed that the smartest boxboys gravitated to other tasks, like stocking shelves, or pretending to do so, and straightening cans and bottles in the coolers, etc.

Which left me to bag groceries.

That may not sound like a traumatic job for a sixteen-year-old, but since that year saw the celebration of the sesquicentennial of Washington State, management decided it would be neat if we all wore coonskin caps.

Every shift, I lived in dread of meeting someone I knew.

Then I got let go, for one or both of two possible reasons. Basically they simply had overhired for the initial grand-opening rush, then fired a few. I was probably put on the list either for lack of enthusiasm or because I had declined to join the union. Normally I am pro-union, but they wanted me to pay dues of like $100 for a job that paid about $300 or 400. So I was like, “Do something about this coonskin cap and I’ll join.”

American supermarkets are big and scientifically laid out. Walking through one, for someone not accustomed to them, is not only a brain-busting sensory overload – so many products! Such a wide selection! – you can also hear the psychologists and architects and management consulting about where to put which product, and how best to display it. “We’ll put the pharmacy near the entrance, because that way you don’t have the old people clogging up the aisles with their little electric tricycles, and the bright sugary things near the cash registers, and more bright sugary things at the end of every aisle, etc etc.” Supermarkets are totally brilliant, they are a science and an art.

Since I’d grown up around them, it took Alpha to make me aware of their power to overwhelm. Early in our relationship, we lived in Seattle for a year and she went to a supermarket to buy cinnamon. She unfortunately forgot the word “cinnamon”, and had to go up and down every aisle, past millions of versions of various products, looking for spices, and then once she’d found the spice aisle (about 40 yards long, seven shelves high) she had to look at every can, jar and envelope for a label with a picture of something like cinnamon.

She came home and had to lie down for a few hours with a cool washcloth on her forehead, and never got her cinnamon.

Where she came from, they still have mom-and-pop stores. Our village has one – a “supermarket” that’s been around for about a hundred years, and is still owned by the family of the original owner. Such stores are beginning to die out here, as they died out in the States long ago, but they remain fairly common. If you run out of money, you can run a tab if they know you.

Recently they built a real-live supermarket in a nearby town. You can even get products their to cool pseudo Mexican food and pseudo Asian food, and one flavor of Oreos in small packages and two kinds of peanut butter (chunky and smooth). But the store is maybe one-quarter to half the size of your average American mega-super-market.

And it’s not open 24 hours a day, only from like 8 to 8 or something, and you bag your own groceries (which I do with a professional flair).

And it carries, usually, only one or two versions of each product, usually the generic store brand, and one name brand. Like, you want cornflakes, there is about 15 feet of shelf space with ten different cereals, including generic cornflakes and Kellog’s. On our visit to the relatives, we went looking for cornflakes. The cereal aisle was about 70 yards long, the width of the entire store, anyway, and had sugary cereal products on shelves from floor to ceiling, in various sizes, shapes and colors. Hundreds of options. We finally gave up before locating our plain cornflakes.

[Insert crackpot rant about how a wide selection of a limited range of products is not the same thing as freedom of choice]

At any rate, it was overwhelming, a little sickening in its excess. But I’m just stating the obvious again, aren’t I.