“Broken dreams on isle 9….”

When I was 8 years old my dream was to live in a supermarket. The fluorescent lights! The isles of products! Produce galore! It was almost overwhelming to a sheltered boy whose imagination hadn’t yet developed – I used to sit on the couch and pretend to mow the lawn.

Every time I entered a grocery store, it was a chance to change what type of family we were. My family was the type of family that, when you asked them for a snack, would offer you some oats, plain yogurt or possibly some fennel to chew on. I wanted to be like the families that offered their snacks in colorful, individual serving, snack packs. And they were right here in front of me! It wasn’t a secret. All we had to do to become one of those families was to pull the products off the shelves and stack them on the conveyer belts.

Unfortunately, my family never bought the fruit snacks, the fun packs, the “easiest way to make your child happy is to give them their food in small little packs!!!” packs. No, we bought food that looked like it had been delivered on a wagon by a guy named Huckabee. Sure, buying in bulk made economic sense, but when you’re 8 years old, saving money didn’t make sense. Spending the most amount of money did.

One of the reasons I assumed grocery shopping should be equally expensive AND exciting was exciting was because of my favorite show, Supermarket Sweep (which has a pretty incredible wikipedia page). The main premise of the show was to exhibit your expert knowledge of all things grocery. The first few rounds of the game show were devoted to questions that all had answers that served as tiny commercials for specific products. The final round involved a two minute free-for-all where the goal was to grab products that added up to the highest dollar value you could. I spent many a mornings screaming at the TV to “GO FOR THE HAM” and many a nights explaining to my mother how stupid people were for not loading their cart with cheeses.

Shows like this and the Price is Right convinced me that knowing the prices of every product in a supermarket was to my advantage. I didn’t need to know that toothpaste cost around $3. I needed to know that Aquafresh cost $2.97 and Colgate cost $3.19.

Each trip to the grocery store was a chance to do more research. I walked up and down the isles going “Old El Paso Salsa, $2.49…Ortega Salsa, $2.69” until I got a head ache.

My obsession showed no sign of abating when my ninth birthday approached and I asked for “grocery receipts”. My mother wasn’t pleased when I showed her my “sweepstakes route” and eventually barred me from watching Supermarket Sweep altogether after I tried showing her the “stick out my arm and run down the isles shoveling products into the cart” method I was developing. My mother told me she didn’t want me watching shows that glorified shopping. She said, “if you think spending money is the only way to be happy, you’ll spend your entire life trying to make money and won’t enjoy what life is really about!”

Here it is 18 years later and I still have no idea what she was talking about. All I know is grocery stores don’t hold the same allure they once did. They are a chore. In real life, there is no two minute free-for-all, I am not rewarded by picking out the most expensive products and it turns out I memorized all those jingles for nothing.

I no longer care how much less Aquafresh costs than Colgate because I’m buying the store-bought brand (Fresh-a-Fresh). My only time spent in the produce isle is dedicated to wondering if rice tastes good on a baked potato or how long you could eat onions for without getting sick.

The good news is that I’ve developed a way to go to the grocery store and live out my fantasy to pile as many steaks as are available into a cart full of things like Centrum Silver, coffee beans and cheese wheels – just because you put it in your cart doesn’t mean you have to buy it.

Sure, it’s a little depressing to run out of the grocery store screaming “I won” as the store manager chases after you, but it’s better than going into a grocery store wondering if they have any rotten chicken that’s on sale.