My best time is about 11 minutes, maybe 30 to 60 seconds less given that I don’t get a chance to check the stopwatch on my phone until I’m well out of the store and near my car.
On the rare occasions I do some shopping for only two or three items — and I use the self checkout lanes — I can make it out of the market in six minutes. Seven if I’m taking my time.
In the early days of the pandemic I could spend as much as 45 minutes in a grocery store, an amount of time which now seems counter intuitive given that there was almost nothing on store shelves to buy. But it didn’t take long before I adapted a guerilla-style of shopping: get in, get out and travel lightly.
Most excursions require at least eight items to make going out into the dirty worthwhile. And they have to be things I can place in a hand basket. A shopping cart, while providing the benefit of about three feet of distance between me and another person, doesn’t allow for the quick serpentine movement required to navigate crowds clogging aisles as they ponder the varieties of available cereal.
I need to move the way water slips through cracks and in between pebbles. A grocery cart won’t let me do that.
I’ve been known to squeeze grocery carts between dawdling gawkers traipsing along as if we were not living in the time of an airborne disease. But squeezing between carts the way an overconfident (or oblivious) SUV driver squeezes between the lines of a compact car parking space in a parking garage requires slowing down if you’re hoping to avoid contact or collision.
Shopping these days is all about speed, baby. I have my list and my mission. I don’t have time to browse or comparison shop or to wait for a couple to settle their differences in the middle of the frozen foods section.
The need to be on the run and the lookout has been magnified since I downloaded the CA Notify app, the software that will alert me to potential exposure to COVID-19 if it detects I have been close to a potential carrier for 15 minutes or more. Even more reason to shop quickly.
A trip to the market is nerve wracking but at least it has also become a form of aerobic exercise.
