The sad state of 3:00 grocery shopping

I may never go grocery shopping in the middle of afternoon on a weekday ever again. For various reasons, I ended up taking the day off from work and did a bunch of household tasks to compensate. These included a trip to QFC, where I learned what sort of esteemed company grown men who go grocery shipping in the middle of a weekday keep. Most striking was the wave of elderly tottering around the aisles in their sad sweet way, slowly inching a cart in front of them, getting puzzled over which brand of bagels best suits them. In half an hour at the store I saw at least a half dozen hunched, white-haired old people. I kept bumping into the same little old lady, and every time she looked at me a little more suspiciously. When we got to the registers together, she had two items in her cart, whereas I had six boxes of cereal and that’s just getting started. I felt pretty OK about my fairly-healthy purchases until I looked over to the next line and say a guy my age with practically the same groceries in his basket: a slacker to the core, complete with used t-shirt and piercing, and buying the same food as me at 3:00.

I think from now on I’ll stick to shopping at 8 pm, the domain of hip young urbanites like myself. And winos.