My mother used to take me grocery shopping with her when I was a little boy in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Our favorite store was Hinky Dinky. It was an independent store, not part of any chain, located near the Big Sioux River on West 12^th Street. The service was fantastic. The store was always bustling with workers in white, short-sleeved dress shirts and blue aprons. The manager always wore a blue tie. Everyone was friendly. A cashier rang up our food and a teenager expertly bagged our groceries—heavy canned goods at the bottom, lighter items on top. The bags were all made of sturdy paper back then. Our purchases were placed in a numbered cart and the cashier wrote the number on the back of our receipt boldly in marker for identification purposes in the drive-through. My mother had a pet peeve about them slamming the trunk of our station wagon too hard. “Don’t slam the trunk,” she implored. They always would and my mother would always cringe. “They slammed the trunk again,” she would say to me, affronted, as if she’d been spit on or slapped in the face. I just remained silent. There was nothing I could do, and it didn’t seem like much to complain about.

As was commonplace then, there was a mechanical horse at the front of the store that you could ride for a mere penny. I loved it. I could always sense my mother’s impatience as she permitted me this impish indulgence. She was a hard-working, busy woman. Hinky Dinky sold barbeque rotisserie chickens that you brought home in foil bags. The chickens were scrumptious, my favorite meal. One year, Hinky Dinky held a Thanksgiving turkey coloring contest. An illustration of a turkey was printed on all the bags. I was excited to color my turkey. Shockingly, my mother received a call from the store informing her I had won. This was the first time in my life that I had ever won anything. I could not have been prouder to claim my prize—a free gallon of Kemp’s ice cream. The front windows of the store were plastered over with hundreds of colored turkeys. I knew I possessed above-average artistic ability, but what set my turkey apart? A young, blonde woman accompanied us to the frozen section.

“Why did I win?” I asked earnestly. Anyone could color a turkey within the lines and my crayons weren’t any better than anyone else’s.

“You were the only child to put clothes on your turkey,” she said. “You got a prize for originality.”

I had drawn a purple vest on my turkey. There was no question about it, I was definitely a genius. My breast swelled as if injected with brine.

“What flavor do you want?” she asked.

“I can have any flavor?” The ice cream was stacked high in plastic buckets: chocolate, strawberry, Neapolitan, mint chocolate chip, butter pecan. . . So many possibilities. My eyes got big and my mouth watered. After an agonizingly long pause, I chose plain old vanilla. My mother drove me home with the frosty bucket in my lap.

The experience of grocery shopping some 46 years later is markedly worse. Service (an important word that you could wisely base your life on) does not exist. We live in the era of self-checkout. I can accept that innovations in automation will eliminate many jobs, but this isn’t automation. It’s more like, fuck you and do it yourself. You can spend 200 bucks without a thank you or a hello. To top it off, Minneapolis imposes a 5-cent tax on every plastic bag you use. My attitude toward this tax is on par with my mother’s trunk being slammed. Yes, I possess cloth bags, but I rarely have my wits about me enough to remember them. Also, I reuse the bags for garbage and storing open food in the fridge. The city requires garbage, which they burn, to be bagged. I don’t see the point of using cloth bags, only to buy plastic bags for my kitchen waste. I will admit a world without plastic bags is probably a better one. Fishing in the Mississippi River, I’ve noticed plastic bags stuck in the trees at the exact same height. They lined the shoreline like Halloween ghosts. It puzzled me for a moment, until I realized that they had all snagged in the branches at that level from a recent flood.

There are things that annoy me at every grocery retailer I shop. The laundry detergent at Target is kept behind locked glass and you’re in for at least a ten-minute wait. Aside from that, their customer service is better, but their meat department offers poor selection and is grossly overpriced. Also, the atmosphere is soulless and corporate. I feel the same way about Walmart although I appreciate their fishing department and their availability of at least some American manufactured goods.

I mostly shop at the Fresh Thyme near the University Post Office where I work. Their range of produce is excellent, and the shoppers tend to be young and attractive. My complaint about that store is that I’m convinced they use facial recognition software at the self-checkouts, which I find creepy and invasive. Frequent shopper activated, a disembodied, feminine voice states as I scan my first item. If I am wearing sunglasses and a bicycle helmet, the system does not recognize me. I’ve actually inquired to their corporate headquarters about this online, but I never received a response.

I don’t particularly enjoy grocery shopping unless my 11-year-old joins me as my wingman. I like making dad jokes as we shop. On a recent excursion to my neighborhood Cub, I noticed a man hassling people at the entrance. Wearing a soiled trench coat and in need of a shave, he looked like an extra in a 70’s cop movie. I pushed our cart a few feet into the store and observed him shoplifting a container of frosted blue cupcakes.

“Did you see that?” I asked my son.

“Yeah, I saw it.”

“What a loser,” I commented.

I guided my boy to the juice aisle.

“Do you want apple juice,” I asked.

“Sure, I’ll take apple juice.”

I noticed the security guard, an elderly man who could barely walk. He shuffled around the store talking to himself.

“No wonder people are stealing shit,” I said. “You think that guy is going to chase them down?”

My son laughed.

“You should never shoplift,” I said. “Everything in the store costs more because people shoplift.”  

My last trip to Cub was a solo outing on a Saturday night. There weren’t many shoppers in the store. A man with a neck brace talked loudly into his phone. I caught a piece of his conversation as I waited patiently for him to get out of the way so I could purchase my favorite brand of raviolis.

“Does she think I have idiot tattooed on my forehead?” he asked.

I really had to restrain myself from laughing at him. Yeah, buddy, I thought, you kind of do.

When I went to pay for my cart full of food, only the self-checkout was open. At this point, I’m a pro at ringing in my produce. I rarely trigger the red, help-me light. People paying with cash are always messing up in the pay-by-card-only checkouts. Such was the case, not surprisingly, with Mr. Neck Brace. The stations didn’t even have bags! The place was gutted. Outraged, I looked around for an employee to yell at. The security guard, a skinny young man, stared at me with an expression of terminal boredom. I took a breath, realizing the security personnel were contracted out and only responsible for security. A Cub employee in a black polo finally showed up to help Mr. Neck Brace. It appeared he was the only one working in the whole store. He looked so demoralized and frazzled that I didn’t have the heart to complain. Instead, I located some bags at the unmanned regular check-outs and left the store vowing never to return.

Obviously, if a business is not locally owned and managed, the quality of care, both for customers and employees, will suffer. According to Wikipedia, Cub was a family business founded in Stillwater, Minnesota in 1968. Back then it was probably pretty similar to Hinky Dinky, a family-friendly place to shop. Now the company is a wholly owned subsidiary of United Natural Foods, based in Providence, Rhode Island. Profits over people. Corporations over culture. Forget about Making America Great Again, folks. It went in the bag a long time ago.