The grocery store.

In my personal lexicon, synonymous with “9th circle of hell” and “places to avoid at all cost.”

I hate the grocery store.

Which is bad for me, since I’m a mom and my kids keep eating all the damn food, and what they don’t eat, my husband eats. Some days I think it would be easier to buy a cow than to keep getting milk, ‘cause Lord knows the milk isn’t free.

And our local chain of grocery stores, bless their little commercial hearts, is on a constant quest to improve the shopping experience. By doing thoughtful things like:

• Completely reorganizing the produce section. And then moving the potatoes and onions from week to week.
• Shuffling the bakery items so that a map is needed to find the muffins.
• Narrowing the aisles to fit more in, thus improving the shopping experience.
  • With the result that if two carts are next to each other, nothing else can possibly get through. Which really puts a damper on that whole “stopping to browse the shelf” experience. Around the tenth time per trip that someone behind me says “excuse me,” I want to pull a Gandalf and say “You shall not pass, dammit! I am trying to figure out whether this chicken broth has MSG!”
• Every month or so, they switch products from aisle to aisle, again, to improve the shopping experience. Which means that I’m trying to find tonic water and looking at a wall of Doritos. Or looking for crackers and finding cereal.
• Those little essentials you buy every time? They are helpfully moved around from endcap to endcap to make them easier to find. Riiiiight.

They’ve also made helpful changes like moving the eggs – at least three times now. The yogurt seems to have a mind of its own, flitting from one side of the aisle to the other, up and down the refrigerated case. And don’t even get me started on the cheese.

Until recently, I was buying the whole “trying to improve your shopping experience” line. But recently, as I was racing around the store pushing a full cart, trying to find cocktail sauce, I said to a sales associate, “Please, please, for the love of all that is holy, tell store management to stop moving things around!”

And she said, with a perfectly straight face, “They just do it so people will spend longer in the store.”

Mission a-freaking-ccomplished.

I spend longer in the store.

But my shopping experience? Not improved.

P.S. If someone could direct me to the SnapPea Crisps I would be forever grateful. They’re not with the chips. They’re not with the croutons. They’re not with the Chex mix.

P.P.S. Don’t bother. If I find them this week, they’ll have moved by next week.