During my teenage years, I worked as a bagger at a grocery store. Occasionally, the manager asked me to return a cart full of abandoned items one-by-one to the shelves.

He might as well have just told me to walk around convincing people I was stupid because that’s all my restocking outings ever accomplished. The number of times I rolled my cart past his workstation cemented my manager’s opinion that I was stupid. My inability to answer basic questions convinced customers of the same fact.

I was a teenager. Of course I didn’t understand the difference between chicken stock and chicken broth. And of course I didn’t know where the Metamucil is – why would you even ask me that – haven’t you ever heard of shame!?

I know the aisles get confusing, but good God man, this is why we keep a pharmacist on staff. Preserve your dignity.

Putting a clueless teenager dressed in a grocery store uniform into the general circulation is like releasing a salmon into a river lined with bears.

Customers approached me with the intensity of millennials connecting to wifi after a cross-country flight; their faces scrunched by ignorance as they sought the one source connecting them to their way of life.

My fantasy back then was for a magical aisle I could direct people to and always be right. Cheerios? Aisle 9. Weight Watchers TV dinners? Also Aisle 9. Raw chicken? You guessed it, Aisle 9!

Which is why I think a bagger was put in charge of the Aisle 9 signage at my local grocery store while a sadist controlled the signage for Aisle 10.

I’ve long been puzzled by the magical disappearing properties of grocery store aisles. I recently spent thirty-six minutes looking for a can of cranberry sauce only to find out it was with canned fruit, not canned vegetables.

Surely, I thought to myself, those would be close together because no rational person distinguishes between the two. Nope.

Rather than join cranberry sauce with every other canned item in the store, it’s on the far end of the store by the Entenmann’s display in front of the pharmacy.

Don’t even get me started on the Welch’s guys who are purposefully screwing with me.

Like any good magician, grocery stores know that you need to counter your disappearing acts with equally surprising appearances.

Even though virtually every person goes to the grocery store, almost nothing else surprises me as much as running into someone I know there.

Having someone I know from a different context suddenly shopping at the same time and in the same place as me produces a genuine jolt of surprise-fueled adrenaline that makes me shout an overly enthusiastic greeting that’s normally paired with a meaningless sense of luck or fortune.

I might even challenge the cosmos by asking, “What are the odds!?”

Good. The odds are good that there will be other people at the grocery store, yet I’m dumbfounded every time.

This excitement, of course, carries an implication that all of the other people in the store matter significantly less. It seems unfair to carry on with excitement over seeing one person while ignoring another who’s just trying to get past. Especially since showing up was the only criteria that made the encounter remarkable in the first place.

But if I’m trying to find someone in a grocery store, it’s right back to magical disappearances. I can walk the entire length of a grocery store multiple times with a straight view down each aisle and still not find the person I’m looking for.

When I was a kid, the vanishing point in a grocery aisle was exactly the size and shape of my mother; now that I’m a grown adult, it’s exactly the size and shape of my wife.

Despite having been professionally trained to work in two different grocery store chains and habitually passing through one throughout my entire adult life, I still can’t comprehend the magical disappearing properties of grocery store aisles.

 

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