It's the Club Pack Life for Me (Adventures in Grocery Shopping)

(in general, it makes me feel sick to my stomach to fill a post with mediocre 

pictures from my phone... but I'd look even MORE out of place and 

ridiculous with my  camera around my neck at the grocery store.  

Poor quality camera photos courtesy of my pride... and apologies in advance.)

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~ It's the Club Pack Life for Me ~

(Adventures in Grocery Shopping)

I am a spectacle when I go grocery shopping.  A spectacle.  

And it's always something different.  Sometimes I have all the kids - some of them precariously perched in the cart, some of them dangling off the sides, some of them fondling the produce with fingers they just took out of their nose.  Last week I caught one of my children sinking her teeth into a package of pricey Gouda that, until a few days earlier, had been "aging" in an underground cheese cave for longer than the offending child had been alive.  

Sometimes I only have two children - one in the cart who is allowed an unlimited number of rice cakes in exchange for a pleasant disposition, and one strapped to my back.  The one on my back is systematically enlarging the bald spot under my ponytail one fistful of hair at a time.  With the baby-back-rider method of grocery shopping, it's safe to say that for every item I take out of the store, I leave a knotted wad of hair behind on the floor.  

Sometimes I just have one child and it's (verging on) delightful!   We go at 5:30 AM to avoid the crowds and to casually spy on investigate the morning floor-waxing crew.  I'm paranoid they'll be hunting me down: "Hey Mac!  It's malfunctioning again!  Too much mousy brown hair trapped in the mechanism..."   I mean, they could track me down.  There's DNA in hair, right?  And then there's my fingerprints all over the macadamia nuts    that I really wanted to buy but put back after remembering "the budget."  Evidence everywhere.

It's always something.  But the one thing that never changes is the volume.  So. many. groceries.  I get crazy bug-eyed jealous when I see young single professionals getting on the checkout line.  They push a mini cart up to the conveyor, neatly put 3 cups of yogurt, a 1/2 gallon of almond milk, a box of Wheat Thins, two bananas, and a six-pack of California rolls up there.  Food for a week.  It looks so neat, and manageable, and civilized.  I'm jealous not because I long for fewer mouths to feed, but because I long for a shopping trip that is a calm, wholesome exercise in selecting personal nourishment... not a three ring circus.  

When I shop for my family, the picture that the shopping cart paints is not one of civilization but of barbaric hordes with insatiable appetites... and toilet paper needs.  When I make it to the register I'm a sweaty mess.  The cart is completely and utterly overloaded.   Wide-eyed employees have approached me and asked with a mix of pity and incredulity, "do you think you need another cart??"  I can't imagine what they think the problem is - the glass jars of salsa and dill pickles teetering at the top of my grocery mountain aren't in any more danger of falling and shattering here in the store than they are in the hands of my children who will help put put them away at home.   So...???

There's no way around it.  People eat food.  Seven people live in my home.  Seven of them eat food.  And we don't homestead.  Or make our own re-usable toilet paper.  So when I go shopping, it's. a. haul.  

But our favorite grocery chain, Wegmans (the best grocery store in America, so says Consumer Reports), makes it easy on a mom like me.   Wegmans sells their already reasonably-priced store brand food and stuff in further-reduced price club packs.  Only, they must have recently sunk millions into a marketing study to determine that "Family Pack" was a more consumer-friendly term.   "Club Pack" was abandoned for "Family Pack", and believe me, this family is on board.   

Wegmans has more than quintupled (not actual data; just me eye-balling it) their Family Pack offerings in the past year and a half.  It used to be you could just buy paper products in bulk.  But now it's much more.  And I'm so grateful!  I leave there with Family Packs of fresh fruit, salad greens, red peppers, cucumbers, frozen fruit and vegetables, eggs, flour tortillas and tortilla chips, peanut butter, cheese, bread, cereal, salsa, pasta sauce, ground beef, chicken breasts, and more.  And you know we're going to eat it all. 

I love doing my big shopping super early in the morning - the store is nearly empty and I'm in a good frame of mind (I tend to buy less junk when I shop early.)  But in the early mornings they only have one cashier working to handle the normal 5:30 crowd - the two or three young, single professionals who already bought their yogurt and Wheat Thins earlier in the week and are now there only to buy an espresso and fresh, steaming croissant, not fourteen pounds of tissues.  One morning I could hear a collective groan from the customers around me as a started unloading my Family Packs of this and that onto the counter.  "What, is that like groceries for a month??" the man behind me asked.  (Honestly, it felt more like a commentary than a question.)   I laughed nervously.  "Hahaha.  This is for this week," I answered trying to look very busy lifting 16 lbs of apples and oranges out of my cart.  

My favorite story ever though, involved me with my normal load of Family Pack groceries and a far-from-normal instance of being "hit on."  (is that still what the kids are calling it these days??)  Maybe I forgot to wear my wedding ring that day, or maybe I had actually brushed my hair, or maybe I had gotten a few hours of uninterrupted sleep the night before and the ever-present dark circles under my eyes were looking light grayish instead of death-ish.  Who knows... but something overtook the cashier's powers of common sense, general awareness of his surroundings, and average abilities to assess the situation at hand.  He asked me if I was going to the big regional singles party that night.  I started sweating a little more than usual and looked at the groceries he was scanning so obliviously.  Does it look like I'm a single person?????????????   Would a single person be buying eleven canisters of oatmeal and seventeen tons of roasted unsalted almonds???????   Look at what is right in front of you ----- if I was single why in the name of all that is holy would I put myself through the agony and embarrassment of buying the Family Pack of 65 rolls of toilet paper??????????   Instead, I smiled and said, "No.  I'll be tucked in at home with my husband and four children."  (I had four children at the time, but I confess I briefly thought about falsifying the information about my offspring and telling him I had six or seven children just for shock value...)  

I know that one day I'll go to the grocery store and buy a mini-cart's worth of groceries - enough for Russ and I for a few days of simple eating.  One day, we'll be the empty nesters re-learning how to cook dinner for two.  But for now, feeding my family well is both a blessing and an ordeal.  Going grocery shopping feels like an Olympic event and looks like a carnival side show.  And for the next 15 years, at least, it's the club pack life for me :)