If you think you’ve seen everything when it comes to grocery shopping I’ve got news for you, you haven’t. Or, at least, I had not until last Saturday.
Technology, it seems, has come a long way when it comes to filing up a shopping cart. Take Vowell’s Marketplace here in Forest, for example. For a while now they have offered Online Shopping and curbside pick up of groceries. I’ve never used the service, but understand it is quite convenient from those that have.
Likewise, I do like to use the self-check lane when I’m picking up motor oil or vitamins from Walmart, which I find very convenient. Some do, some don’t.
When it comes to food, though, I’m one of those picky kind of people who likes to pick out his own meat and vegetables and I like to make sure the canned goods are not dented or leaking or anything like that.
I grew up in the A&P Grocery Store where my dad was the manager and my mom the bookkeeper. I worked there too until moving to the Delta and starting a newspaper career after finishing college.
Growing up in the A&P we would often find ourselves grilling the steaks that had begun to turn a little bit and shaving the mold off of extra-aged cheese. At our house we even had a shelf full of canned goods that had lost their labels and after school we got to take our chance with shake and see meals.
We would shake the can and try to guess if we were having SpagettiOs or dog food for dinner. There was pretty much a 50/50 chance of it being one or the other. Fortunately back then the cat foods and dog foods didn’t look anything like roast beef and gravy as they do today, so once we popped open the can we knew right away whether to dump it in April, the German Shepherd’s bowl, or put it in a pot on the stove. These days I’m not so sure. Some of those canned dog foods look really good and smell good too.
But to say things have changed might very well be an understatement when you fast forward to the year 2018.
My wife and I were in the city (Metro Jackson) this past weekend visiting with our daughter and we stopped at the local Kroger to pick up a couple of items for dinner. As anyone who was not in a coma on Saturday surely knows it rained, and rained, and rained some more, and it was a cold rain to boot. We figured something warm, creamy, and bone-sticking would be good and opted for homemade fettucini alfredo to fill that craving.
After sloshing though a flooded parking lot that was not only flooded with rain water, but ornery people as well, we finally made it through the front door and grabbed a buggy. Just inside the doors, they now have a big rack of “Scan, Bag, Go” hand-held scanners. Shoppers are invited by a little video screen to grab a scanner, some shopping bags, and go to town filling them up.
The little device does everything for you. You pick up a pack of chicken, scan the bar code, drop it in the bag, and move on down the isle. If it is onions the recipe calls for, you scan the bar code on the shelf, bag up all the onions you think you need and head over to a little scale with another bar code on it and wham, bam, thank you ma’am, you’re ready to go again.
Once you arrive at the self check station, you scan another bar code and seconds later all your goods appear on the screen, you punch pay and you are done.
Some folks complain that these automated check-out thingamajigs are doing away with paying jobs and putting more folks out on the streets looking for a place to work. That may very well be true, but I’ve got be honest, it sure was convenient!
That’s technology for you, but I’m still pretty sure those machines cannot distinguish between dog food and SpaghettiOs any better than we could in 1972 if the label is missing from the can!
