I’m not allowed to go to the grocery store. Seriously.
I mean, there isn’t a local city ordinance against it. I won’t be arrested by the police the moment I walk out of the store holding a bag filled with pretzels and chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream. I’m not on an FBI watch list or anything for buying too many boxes of Crunch Berries. Law enforcement has nothing to do with my supermarket ban. It is my own family who has forbidden me. My wife, whom I love, has enacted a household policy that I don’t shop for the family ever again.
It seems harsh, this lifetime banishment from buying Twinkies. What did I do that was so heinous that I can’t pick up some Nilla wafers and vanilla frosting? I couldn’t tell you. I am ignorant of my crimes. If you ask me, I’m a simple guy. Give me a list, and I’ll go to the store and get you what is on the list (and a couple of snacks for the effort, of course). My wife says I’m grocery-store challenged. She claims that I only buy the most expensive items on the shelves and that I don’t know the first thing about how to buy stuff on sale.
I love my family, so I buy them the best stuff on the market. Everyone knows there is a huge difference in taste between Morton’s salt and that cheap, generic salt. I spare no expense on my family and their taste buds (especially my own). My wife isn’t convinced. She thinks I just buy whatever has the highest price tag because I’m a dumb person who can’t add two plus two. I don’t go to the grocery store to do math. I go to get Boston cream pie. I work hard for my money. I’ve earned the right to spend my money on things that make me fat. This is America, dammit, the land of the super size. I can’t help myself; I like the good stuff.
Speaking of good stuff, I love to cruise every aisle of the store just to peruse what might feel good in my belly. Oprah says never go to the store hungry, and I believe Oprah when she talks about weight issues because she certainly has them. I don’t listen to her when she talks about money issues, because she doesn’t have any issues with money (except where to put it all). Regardless of Oprah’s advice on not going to the store hungry, I don’t think I’ve ever been to the store when I didn’t get crazy hungry. Just looking at all the tasty treats gets my tummy into a frenzy.
What can I say? I love food. This body I have takes work. You can’t get an extra chin by not going to the store and buying all the holiday cookies. You gotta have those. Some people decorate their houses on St. Patrick’s Day by putting a cute little sign shaped like a shamrock in their front yard. Not me. I decorate the house by adorning the kitchen table with shamrock-shaped cookies. Then I decorate my stomach with those sugary babies, one after another. Yum!
For me, the store only has three sections: the bakery, the frozen section, and the area where they keep the cheese. Pasta, vegetable, and soup aisles—those are just different places to park your shopping cart while you head into the cheese court to get more bricks of heaven.
In defense of my wife banning me from grocery shopping, I do have priors for spending a ton of money at the store and coming home with only a few snacks. A few hundred dollars should at least cover a few meals for the family. But when I go to the store, all we get is snacks for the pre-game. I don’t even remember to get enough food for the game itself or the ever-important post-game nosh. My stomach sort of has short-term memory. I can only think with my stomach about what I want that particular second and don’t really plan for the future—even if I’m buying donuts at 9 o’clock in the morning and the future is lunch.
Since I can’t go to the store, all the shopping is on the shoulders and the whim of my wife. She isn’t a simple person. She doesn’t make lists. If you tell her what you want at the store, she doesn’t automatically buy it. She might pick up a version of it that is on sale. You want some Double Stuff Oreos? Instead, you’ll get a bag of Cory-Os. Sure the bag is blue and there are two chocolate discs sandwiching some white goo, but Cory-Os taste nothing like Oreos. Instead, they taste like chalk sandwiched in cardboard. Yuck! That would never happen on my watch with the grocery list.
The other day, my wife asked me what I wanted from the store (I don’t know why; she wasn’t going to get any of it anyway). So I rattled off a few items of yummy goodness. I could see in her eyes she was already giving the thumbs down to most of my picks. In fact, she was exasperated with me for even asking her to get some snacks. We needed snacks so we could watch the Daytona 500. So she asked me, “You’ve listed three different types of ice cream. Do you mind if I pick at least one of the flavors?” I thought about it for a second and said, “Sure, you can get whatever you want. Shopper’s choice!”
She looked at me with bewilderment. “Shopper’s choice? That’s my reward for buying you snacks to eat while you watch a bunch of dumb cars drive in a circle for three hours?”
“Yeah. And while you’re there, pick us up a birthday cake.”
She came home with rice cakes.
Since Rob’s grocery store banishment, he has lost 10 pounds, and the household budget has saved $300 a month. Rob says that is the very definition of a coincidence.
This article appears in Mar 3-10, 2011.