In the Neighborhood

 My wife is the shopper in this 1950s style relationship. She procures the food, goods, furniture...basically everything for the house. There was one point in our marriage she looked at me and said “you need something of your own in the house. Something I will look at and remember you for.”  I have a few things that are mine, but for the most part, my memories are about experiences and not stuff. 

Back to my story...she does the shopping but there have been a few times that I pointed out she shops the hard way. When we lived In Virginia, our apartment was directly across the street from a new strip mall with a Harris Teeter. Harris Teeter is a neighborhood grocery. In that area, there is Giant, Harris Teeter, and huge everything grocery stores like Wegmans. Wegmans is about 20 minutes from where we lived. 

The wife wanted to buy a mince meat pie for her grandmother and had to meet up with her cousins for pre-Thanksgiving coffee. Because it was the day before Thanksgiving, the Wegmans she drove to was packed. The parking lot was a ... parking lot. There was only one way into the lot and it was jammed with people coming in and leaving. It took her nearly an hour to leave the parking lot. So after a lot of frustration, and being late with her meetup, she got home and explained her ordeal. “On top of that, Wegmans only had one mince pie and it was frozen.” She explained. 

I walk a lot. I may have mentioned it. So when she explains to me the story, I asked “Did you check at Harry Teet?” She spent about an hour or 10 minutes of real time explaining to me the intricacies of supply chain management in a grocery store and how it wouldn’t make sense that Harris Teeter would have mince pies. So I dropped it. 

She had forgotten one thing and needed to grab something on the way to her grandmothers from Harris Teeter. We walked into the neighborhood store and sitting on a large table directly in the front of the store is an entire table of fresh baked mince pies. Cheaper than the frozen Wegmans one and already baked, boxed and ready to go. She looked at me, looked at the table, and said without missing a step, “I hate you”. We were in and out of the store in 5 minutes. 

This was years ago. This week, my wife and I were discussing how she is running to every big box Target in the city to get the things she needs for Christmas. Cicero, West Loop, River North...

While she was shopping “aka pushing buttons”, I asked her if she checked the neighborhood Target. For a little background, the neighborhood Target is small. I have seen Bodegas that were the size of this Target. But...whenever I have gone there looking for something, it was there. It is the Harris Teeter of Targets. 

To placate me, she searched the store in the neighborhood and sure enough, they had what she was looking for. She looked at me, looked at her phone and said “I hate you”. Then she started on this tangent about how I probably called Harris Teeter, ordered 25 fresh baked mince pies and had them place them all on a table in the front of the store...because I would do something like that just to be right. 

So if you are looking for that one hard to find item, maybe it would be easier to just check in your own neighborhood.