I went shopping with a friend of mine today. It is the day after a local holiday, so the store was packed.
Here are some quick impressions of the change from Wal-Mart to real—in list form!:
- real seems bigger than Wal-Mart. Even though the two occupy the same physical space, real seems to have more stuff. This might be an optical illusion, however, but I believe part of the reason it seems so is that they dropped/slimmed a couple of sections (books, clothing, and automotive accessories) to make room for more of other things (sports paraphanelia and drinks being the first things that come to mind).
- real is more expensive than Wal-Mart when it comes to pop. Coke products were more expensive than anywhere else. Pepsi products are about the same price. Dr Pepper and 7-Up seem to have disappeared, sadly.
- real is better-designed than Wal-Mart. The logical flow actually makes more sense at real. With Wal-Mart it sometimes seemed like they didn’t have room to put something anyplace else, so they put it in one section one day and just never did any renovation. Spontaneous order works well with societies, but not with grocery store product placements.
- real still carries some strange American products. You can purchase Fluff here. Seriously. It’s right next to the Nutella, which, I suppose, is exactly where it belongs. Fluff, Tony, is a marshmallow spread. No, I don’t eat it. No, I don’t know who does. Well, Pat does, so I do know one person who partakes in such delicacies.
- All in all, prices seem slightly higher at real, but for most of my purchases, they’re roughly the same. From what I had heard, meat was very inexpensive, but that appears to only be true for pork and beef. Turkey is about the same price, and I didn’t know about chicken because when we went, it was all gone and needed to be restocked.
At any rate, we made it through and got to the checkout lines with two baskets full of stuff. I found a line which seemed short, as all of them had lots of people waiting to check out. At this point in time, I thought to myself, “The shortest line inevitably is full of idiots.” Well, when we went to check out, I turned out to be the idiot. I purchased some bananas so as to make milkshakes and apparently needed to print out a stupid label, and I guess the person at the register either couldn’t do it or was too lazy to, so she sent me to a little produce scanner to print the appropriate sticker. I, however, had no clue what she was talking about, so played the game of “Walk three steps, turn around, have her motion me forward” for roughly 30 feet, until I finally saw the thing and a light bulb went off in my head. I printed the sticker out (86 cents, by the way) and brought it back. I’m surprised she didn’t give me a gold star or a Special Olympic medal for my feat of intellectual triumph…
