Safeway Observations

It's kind of a fatty S, when you think about it.

1) Safeway has a very small DVD section where you can get movies like Ghostbusters II and Space Buddies for $7. Over the course of multiple trips to Safeway, I’ve discovered that they’re selling no less than five movies featuring Tom Selleck. There’s a couple of made-for-TV movies where he plays a gruff (and, presumably, mustachioed) small town detective along with two to three different westerns. I find this interesting given the fact that I could spend all day in the Blockbuster Video next door and find perhaps two Tom Selleck movies in the whole place.

2) Furthermore, only one of the movies available at Safeway features Gene Hackman (it’s Hoosiers). This is difficult to get my head around, because experience has led me to believe that Gene Hackman has been in every movie ever made, right on down to Super-8 Russian horse porn from the 1960s. I’m serious; ask somebody to name the first ten movies they can think of and I’ll bet you anything Gene Hackman was in one of them. The reason people don’t play Six Degrees of Gene Hackman is because it’d be like playing Six Degrees of People Who Urinate On a Regular Basis – you can’t swing a cat in Hollywood without hitting Gene Hackman.

3) Next to the DVD section is a rack of Personal Distress Alarms – essentially tiny keychain sized speakers which you keep on your person and then activate when you’re in Distress. Then, (as the package gleefully explains) the device will emit a 95-decibel alarm klaxon to “signal for help and frighten away your attacker.” I have two problems with this:

i) Unless a gang of unusually skittish deer attacks you, a loud noise isn’t going to frighten away somebody who wants to beat the shit out of you bad enough to try in the first place.

ii) People already have a built in Personal Distress Alarm. It’s called Your Voice, it’s highly versatile in terms of volume and content, and it doesn’t cost $14.95.

There were only two of these left on the shelf when I was there, as though their arrival at the store had sent waves through the community of paranoid people who can’t afford guns.

4) I’ve made a resolution that at any given time there will be no more than three (3) frozen dinners in my refrigerator, in a weak attempt to purify my diet. In order to go one step further, when I hit the frozen food aisle I make a point of searching out the organic options that aren’t full of ingredients that have words like “hydrogenated,” “syrup,” or “____ dye no. 7” in them. This limits me to about one shelf, half of which is occupied by items that are chock full of mushrooms, limiting my choice to Organic Mac & Cheese. This ensures very little variety, as most of my dinners for the past two weeks have either been pasta I’ve made myself or pasta someone else has made and I’ve heated up.

5) I buy an awful lot of Yoplait (item #307 on the list of Things I Do That Make People Question My Manhood), and I’ve noticed that for the past year or so they’ve included an offer on the top of the cup to donate ten cents to breast cancer research for every foil lid that consumers mail in, up to a total of $1.5 million. I don’t understand why if Yoplait is willing to donate $1.5 million to breast cancer research they don’t just fucking donate it already instead of waiting for millions of people to mail them their garbage first. Cut out the middleman and save some lives, already!

6) Whenever the automatic sprinklers in the produce aisle go on to water the merchandise, they play the sound of a thunderclap on the store P.A. system, presumably so that people will get the impression that a rainstorm has swept in to keep Safeway’s produce delicious and fresh, the natural way. This makes me sad every time I hear it, and I can’t quite put my finger on why.

7) Safeway is a wonderful crossroads of college hipsters and crazy hobos. On any given evening late in the week, one can find a small army of Greek life types buzzing around the store in search of mixers and ping pong balls as well as homeless people who appear to be lost. On my most recent trip, I passed by a homeless man on my way to the store who was screaming profanity at the top of his lungs at the cars that passed him on the road. Fifteen minutes later he was calmly paying the checkout lady for a tall boy of Miller High Life.

8) Pop-Tarts are not located in the convenient breakfast area. I see this as a profound mistake, because I’ve never encountered a breakfast more convenient than Pop-Tarts. When you don’t want to wake up more than ten minutes before class but know you’ll be hungry if you don’t eat something, you grab a packet of Pop-Tarts and eat them while you’re walking out the door. The only way it could get more convenient would be if beautiful women hand fed them to you and then moved your jaw up and down.

Truman Capps spends far too much time at Safeway.