Before I go any further, let me assure you that my husband and I do, in fact, have lives. We even have interests - lots of them - that don’t involve grocery stores. But as I’ve said in previous blog entries, my husband loves grocery shopping. The grown-up analogy for “kid in a candy store” could be “my husband in a grocery store.” And it’s contagious. Sometimes, shopping is a great adventure.
Take the weighing of produce. For quite a while, when I’d shop at a grocery store near work (alone), I noticed that the produce scales also had touch pads. You could enter the code, and it would print out a price label. I noticed them, but I ignored them. Most of the time, I wasn’t buying produce, anyway, and when I was - oh, I don’t know why I never checked it out, but I never checked it out. At the time, the grocery stores that I’d visit with my husband did not have that type of scale.
Last year, one of the grocery chains we shop at opened a new store. We decided we liked that one better than some of the ones that were closer to our house, and switched to that particular store. Well, it wasn’t long before my husband, in his quest to have the ultimate grocery shopping experience each and every time, noticed…the produce scales have key pads. Wow. This was something new. Something different. Something… FUN!
It all started with tomatoes. Yes, I remember the first item we weighed ourselves. Put the bag of tomatoes on the scale, enter the 4-digit code, and VOILA! A nifty little price sticker popped out. (We bought a lot of produce that trip, because my husband was fascinated by this, and, well, it looked like he was having so much fun that I had to try it, too.)
The reason this is running through my mind, and thus ends up as today’s blog topic is due to what happened when we were shopping today. For the first time - the 4 digit codes were worn off or smudged off on two of the items we needed. The first was the yellow peppers - but then I noticed that the peppers had little tiny stickers on them, with a 4 digit code. And yes, it was THE 4 digit code. Whew. But….the celery code was also worn off. And there were no helpful little stickers on the stalks. We both looked at each other like “What are we going to do? We don’t know the code!” Luckily, simultaneously, we both realized that we could just bring it up to the register, unpriced.
This little realization of how much we love weighing our produce reduced us to fits of laughter - and had more than one customer cautiously backing away from us. Which made me observe that most of the customers weren’t using the scales. I guess they just don’t know the fun they’re missing!