On 2013-12-21 23:44:11 +0000, Dave Smith said:

> On 2013-12-21 6:02 PM, sf wrote:
>
>> I love shopping and go up & down almost every aisle. The areas I am
>> rarely in are frozen food, pharmacy, cleaning products, drinks and
>> snacks. The other aisles are a least walked down.
>
> I can't say that I like love shopping but I do it. I do most of the
> cooking so I know what I need. I can't say that I avoid all the centre
> isles because I shop in a number of different stores but usually only
> one of the them per week for basic weekly shopping. Which one I go to
> that week depends on what we need and which one has the best prices.
> I am not as anal as my late brother in law, the engineer who had an
> almost to scale map with a layout of the store and the items and
> locations on each aisle. They keep changing and I can;'t keep track,
> so I wander.
>
> Sometimes I need things that are only available at the most expensive
> one. I don't usually bother with the one that sells the soft drinks
> and snack foods. I skip the one with cleaning products because we order
> ours online. The aisles with prepare foods.... I usually don't even
> bother with. Most of my shopping is for meat, fish, dairy and produce,
> so I can often do most of my shopping around the outside.

One of the reasons we love "grocery shopping" is that we have so many
large local supermarkets that cater to various ethnicities. The closest
and easiest access supermarkets are Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese,
Middle-Eastern, Mexican, Persian and Eastern-European (Actually I think
Jon's is Armenian). We go to all of these with some regularity.

We also have many smaller groceries that are hard-wired to Poland,
Russia, India, Spain, Italy and Turkey. We're 30 miles from LA where we
can find other obscurities; German, Swedish, Brazilian, or the greatest
cheese store on the planet. But mostly we consider those a bit out of
reach. These thirty miles can mean from 45 min. to 1.5 hours each way.

We lolligag up and down every aisle pawing over every curiousity,
trying to figure out what they are, how it's used, how it could be used
instead and so forth. We often say we're the only one that think a fine
ol' weekend evening's entertainment can be had more easily at the
supermarket than at the local movie theaters.

It's a lot of fun.