The New York City grocery store business is made up of a vast mafia cartel that controls, among other things, monetary prices in South Korea, the Academy Awards, Pop-Tart placement on aisle four, and grocery-cart wheel friction.
In short, it’s a racket.
I like to eat, but I don’t like to buy groceries. There are a lot of things I don’t like to do, including, but not limited to, laundry, toilet-bowl scrubbing, exercising, and flossing.
That said, I generally dislike starving more than anything else, so I do go grocery shopping.
There are just two rules for grocers in the business. Rule number one: don’t have carts that roll – it keeps customers in the store longer and helps them work up an appetite.
Rule number two: don’t let the customers eat in the store.
Nibbling in a grocery store is bad form. Especially if it is an item that is priced by weight, say, jelly beans or raw flank steak. As a child. I occasionally ate things in the supermarket when my mother wasn’t looking: grapes, peanuts, the side of the grocery cart.
There were occasions during my childhood. I’m embarrassed to admit, that a booming voice would come over the store’s public address system, “Please do not eat the cheese doodles before you buy them. Shoplifting is a CRIME. Thank you.”
Ergo, eating in a grocery store is a sin. Especially produce.
“Hey Adam, this apple is mealy.”
“It is Eve? They usually have good fruit here.
“Well, you try it then. I knew we should have gone to the other grocery store.” “Attention shoppers – please do not eat the produce before purchasing it. Shoplifters will be prosecuted with difficult childbirth and eternal damnation.”
Lucky for me, shoplifting penalties have gotten somewhat lighter in the past 4,000 years.
Problem is, being around all that food makes me hungry. As a result, I have been known to set land-speed records with grocery carts.
Think of me as the Davy Allison of three wobbling wheels with the fourth one permanently stuck.
Gripping the straight plastic handlebar, I zoom through the aisles, tires screaming, wheels smoking, and boxes of laundry soap and cans of creamed corn teetering on the edges of the cart. With no lanes and no speed limits, it’s good practice for driving in Manhattan.
Here in New York, bums collect grocery carts and adorn them with plastic sheets, construction pylons, directional flags, road flares, stuffed animals, boom boxes, and thousands of soda cans and plastic bottles.
They rattle over bill and dale in all parts of the city as the homeless go about the task of collecting cans for the five-cent deposits.
Odd thing is, that homeless shopping carts always roll perfectly. They get the good ones.
But I suppose it might be too obvious toodling around my local grocery with a road flare and boom box.
Though I suppose they might not bother me when I eat the grapes ….
—Morgan Murphy