Why grocery shopping is one of my favorite things to do

(Originally from a comment on my Facebook post from 2011.)

When Sarah and I were newly married, we were living in Charlotte, NC. She was a graduate student making teaching-assistant money and I was looking for a job there. We had very little money, so there were no “shopping trips” to the mall or anything like that.

But of course, we have to eat! Every week we would go to the grocery store to buy food (there was no going out to eat). This meant the one time we got to spend any money was at the grocery store.

As such, we would spend hours at the grocery store, walking up and down every single aisle, looking at things we aspired to purchase one day “when we had money” (e.g. a fancy-looking tapenade that to this day, we have still never bought), but only buying the staples to make it through the week.

I looked forward to that grocery store trip all week long. And to this day, it’s still one of my favorite things to do.

(I also worked in the produce department at an Albertson’s in college for a short while, so I learned a lot about how things work in a grocery store, and I’m sure that contributes to this as well.)