What began as a standard run to my local grocery store turned into a major frustration last week. As I entered, everything appeared perfectly normal. There were the usual bright lights, clean floors, icy air conditioning. But when I started looking for items on my list, I discovered they were not where I expected to find them. The aisles where I could have shopped blindfolded for the past 25 years had been completely reshuffled.
Tom, the store manager, was very sympathetic. No, I wasn’t losing my mind. Why the change? Younger women customers had complained that the cleaning supplies were too close to the boxed foods across the aisle. I’m not making this up!
It so happened, my thirty-something daughter, Celia was visiting from NYC that week. Without giving her any of the background, I asked her to accompany me to the store and make a sensory evaluation. She was going to be my ‘nose’.
I led her to the aisle of cleaning supplies and asked her to take a deep breath. What did she smell? “I smell rotisserie chicken and Tide,” she said. (The commercial roaster was ten feet away.)
We then sniffed our way down the offending aisle. At close range we did smell chemical scents from detergent bottles and fabric softeners. Now I have to admit, I have never detected any of these odors in the olive oils, dry pasta and boxed rice I’d picked off shelf six feet away on the other side of the aisle. Had I been oblivious for years?
Then I walked around the end of aisle to examine a boxed cake mix. Once shelved facing bottles of Ivory Liquid, it is now resettled across from the spice seasonings. On the side of the box is a four inch long list of ingredients in teeny-tiny type. This mix is simply a food-like substance produced on a factory assembly line just like the detergents. Is this odorless, edible powder more healthful now that its located in a different aisle?
My daughter summarized the situation, This was what she called “a rich peoples’ problem”. That is, a problem created by people who have no real problems to worry about.
Then Celia made a confession. She once put an open container of Glade Plug-In room deodorizer, intended for an outlet near her cat’s litter box, in a bowl with fresh fruit. She didn’t think much about it until she ate a tangerine and was surprised to find that it tasted like fresh linen. Nobody’s perfect.
