I’ve been kicking around this idea for a while now, that I would talk about how and why I’m still a dedicated Safeway shopper, even though Harris Teeter came to town. I had all of these noble (“Harris Teeter prevents its employees from unionizing!” “The prices – the prices! Just across the river at the VA HT’s everything’s 30 cents less!”) and not so noble (“The HT after work is full of the kind of psuedo-food snobbery that I fully admit to participating in, and frankly, I’m unemployed and want to grocery shop in my sweats and not have to bump into my fancy employed professional acquaintances with a cart full of ramen.”) reasons that I was going to outline and declare my undying devotion to the Safeway Formerly Known as the Unsafeway. I was… I really, really was.
But lately I have to admit… I’ve been fervently cheating on Safeway with the new kid in town. It started innocently enough around the holidays. HT has some swankier goods, and it was just one time. I kept coming back to Safeway to do my weekly “big shop” though. With all the time on my hands though, I started cooking for myself more and more and getting back in the kitchen, happy to have time to pursue one of my favorite hobbies. I’d go to Safeway, and they just wouldn’t always have what I needed. Slowly but surely, it made less and less sense to even bother with Safeway, since I knew I’d have to make two trips anyway. (Not to mention the trips to Balducci’s and Dean & Deluca for the occasional treat or far flung ingredient. I am happy to report I haven’t set foot in a Whole Foods in at least 6 months, but that’s a whole different, irrational issue.) Then Lent rolled around, and the Harris Teeter seafood department is truly far better than my dear old Safeway’s, and so every Friday I’d hit the HT to see what was on sale, or to pick up their passable sushi. Since Easter, I’ve been really lazy what with Spring sort of, kind of teasing it’s way out, so I’ve been all about the (exorbitantly priced) salad bar at the Teet. And that brings us to today…
I have desperately needed to go grocery shopping for a couple of weeks now. And as I was gathering up my things and getting ready to go, I never even considered my old friend the Safeway. And I realized that I’m one of those people. Those people who dump the old reliable when the new and shiny comes to town. I have shopped at the Safeway for 7 years. The staff was no longer surly to me. I’d seen it transformed from the Unsafeway into a real, live, modern grocery store complete with a Starbucks, an olive bar and a decent produce section. (Once, many years ago, I went to the Safeway on a Sunday morning looking for tomato juice for bloodies. They had none. What the fuck, I thought. Now, I can get a variety of tomato-based juices, including my preferred Clamato.) Continues after the jump (more…)
