We Went to the Grocery Store!!

The Coronavirus Life: We Went to the Grocery Store!!

Okay, for most of you, this probably isn’t a big deal, but for me and Mr Husband, it was pretty exciting.

A little about us before I begin…Mr. Husband and I are weirdly obsessed with grocery stores. When we’re doing our vacation planning (back when we had vacations), before making our room reservations we will scout out how close the place is to a good grocery store.

While we’re on vacation, we probably spend almost as much time wandering up and down the aisles of grocery stores as we do plodding through museums.

We adore our Monoprix, our Auchon, our Lidl, our Marks & Spencer, our Waitroses, our Dunnes, our…well, as you can see, we really like grocery stores. It’s nearly impossible for us to resist the call to step inside and gawk at the tasty treats and edible souvenirs.

At home, while it is a chore, it’s also a weekly event for us to go to the grocery store. There’s the fun of discovering what might be in the bargain bakery bin and the thrill of finding some item on clearance, but we also like picking out our own produce and looking at what new goodies the store has on offer.

We’re not hugely social, so Oregon’s Stay Home hasn’t been too bad for us. Except when it comes to grocery shopping.

As responsible citizens we decided early on that it would be best to stay out of the stores that were still open (okay, and we’re paranoid about getting a nasty disease). Luckily, one of the stores we go to most often offered an order-online-pick-up service for free.

So, every two weeks, we went through the torment of ordering groceries online, typing in all the allowed and unwanted substitutions, withstood the pain of having someone else pick out our produce, and put up with the uncertainty of which items would still be out of stock.

We did this for five weeks. FIVE WEEKS of not going into a grocery store. (Meanwhile, our neighbors are trundling off to the store every couple days…WTF?) Five weeks of stretching produce as long as possible, of freezing milk to keep it fresh, of not getting any bakery bargains!!

Then one night we ran out of carrots. Sure we had frozen veggies and a few wimpy pieces of celery, but it was still several days before our next scheduled pick up date (these have to be booked almost a week out).

We were also low on several other items, so after several rounds of debate, we finally decided to break our grocery fast and risk our lives. At 8pm we got in the car and headed to the store…excitement and fear pulsing along with the tunes on the radio!

Masks and gloves donned, we passed through the automatic doors.

And then we went nuts!

Okay, I’ll admit, we were both a little tense at first, but when we discovered the store was almost empty, we relaxed a bit, we figured out the one-way aisle system, and we shopped.

And shopped. And shopped.

I know these days you’re supposed to get in and out of the store as quickly as possible, but we couldn’t help it. We went (mostly separately) up and down every damn aisle, we picked up items we normally wouldn’t buy as a way to treat ourselves, we ogled the bakery items, we picked out our own damn produce.

We even found our favorite bamboo-based toilet paper was in stock!

The cashier was super friendly and the whole experience was so much fun, once we got the groceries in the car, we almost wanted to go on the ride again!!

We’re planning one more trip to the grocery store some time this week, but after that we’ll likely return to the online ordering. It’s an absolutely annoying way to grocery shop and does rob us of our weekly excitement, but it also keeps the store workers safe.

Okay, that’s that update done. If you want to check in with my reading recommendations for April and what’s been going on in my writing world, just head to today’s Post #2 HERE.