Tasked with a shopping list for a Mexican dish, I went to the supermarket to look for some dried pinto beans. I couldn’t find them, so I asked the 17-year-old girl working the information desk where they might be found. “Dry beans?” she asked. “Do you mean canned beans?” I replied that canned beans are typically pretty wet. “Is it a new product?” I replied that I thought dry beans had been available in the Americas for roughly 5000 years (Wikipedia says 6000). She said “We have some soup beans, but I’ve never heard of dry or dried beans.”
12 thoughts on “Generation Gap at the Supermarket”
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Was this a Pythagorean supermarket?
The presumably non-unusual Shaws in Cambridge has several shelves of nothing but beans of many different varieties, both dried and canned, packed by Goya.
To protect the guilty, the supermarket identity will be kept hidden. I will say that it is a smaller independent supermarket near Hanscom Field, i.e., in the boring suburbs.
Not surprising. We’re several generations in from where cooking from scratch was a daily activity. Whenever she might have seen bags of dried beans, she had no personal experience or observation in cooking dried beans to connect it to.
You need to ask the 40 year old immigrant looking guy that stocks the shelves, or at least ask a product person. I’ve never had luck with the info desk/customer service people before. Also, always go for the middle aged employees. Bad for flirting, good for getting a timely answer.
I have always wished there was a self service sort of interactive map that I could have of large buildings containing small items. When dropping a patient off at an ER they give you a room number which could be quite deeply nestled in an urban trauma center that I visit infrequently . There is no way to know where to go, and the nurses always get annoyed when we have to ask. Perhaps they need an app for that…or at least lines on the floor. “follow the red triangle tiles to the cath lab.” How hard is that?!
For shopping, I wish I could search for a product and have its locations show up on a store map. Locations of previously, or frequently purchased items would be nice too. In fact, if I didn’t have to spend my time walking through the crowds and finding stuff on the shelf and being tempted by the endcap sale of the day, my life would be better. Oh wait…thats called peapod.com and I love it.
But that requires planning. They don’t deliver for 18-24 hours in my area. So, what if I could use this interactive map application to place and pay for an order from my local store, then pick it up at a Walgreens pharmacy style drive through in 15 or 30 minutes? I want an app for that…or at least a web page.
I had same problem when seeking cheesecloth recently at my local .(yet chain) grocery store. College-aged girl had no idea what I was talking about. The word and concept were completely unfamiliar to her.
@JP “For shopping, I wish I could search for a product and have its locations show up on a store map. Locations of previously, or frequently purchased items would be nice too.”
I hope we can evolve away from the era where store layouts were designed so that you have to pass every potential impulse purchase to pick up the ingredients for one spaghetti dinner.
Can we start a movement to boycott any offer that treats us as or calls us “consumers”? Starting with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner in Congressional testimony on CSPAN?
Philip, at least the 17-year-old didn’t say with that peculiar proud complacency,
“I have NO idea!”
Not surprising. On my first visit to a Wal-Mart I needed to find dowels. So I asked the sales-child. Her reply: “I don’t know what that is.” I tried to make myself understood for a minute without success. Later I found a customer who helpfully pointed me in the right direction.
I often wish my grocery store had a screen that would show me the location of the item I am looking for. Once they have your eyeballs, its not hard to imagine a bunch of other things they could make available for you to see, And its hard to think of a more targeted audience for advertisers,
My wife had a similar experience last week. She was in a store buying a can of black tea (loose) that had a plastic window on the lid.
The checkout girl asked looked at it quizzically and asked, “Is that mud?”
“No, that’s tea,” my wife replied.
“What do you do with it?” asked the girl.
“You pour hot water on it and drink it. It’s good for you; try it sometime.”
> The 40 year old immigrant looking guy
does he mean the the swede, the dane, the black, the scotsman, the jew, the asian, the spaniard, the frenchman, the italian, the russian? Surely he doesn’t refer to the folks whose families immigrated to this continent over a land bridge.
That reminds me of an exchange I had with a young supermarket cashier, when I was buying some bulk ground coriander:
cashier: “What’s this?”
me: “Coriander. It’s a spice. It’s the seeds from cilantro, actually.”
cashier: “Wow, I didn’t know cilantro had seeds!”
“Wow, I didn’t know cilantro had seeds!”
Maybe he thought it was a fern? OK, probably not. In fairness, it was only a couple of years ago that I myself learned the connection between cilantro and coriander (after cooking with them for a decade). And I think I was fifteen before I ever tasted cilantro (my parents were good cooks, but didn’t care for Mexican food).
…at least the 17-year-old didn’t say with that peculiar proud complacency,
“I have NO idea!”
Yeah, they reserve that for arithmetic. (I’m not quite forty yet; can I still be an old crank?)
On the plus side, at least our best and brightest clearly aren’t stuck doing low-level retailing jobs. Janitors with Ph.D.s were not unheard of in Israel not long ago.