Paper or plastic?

I used to love shopping for groceries. I know, I know, one must have at least one loose screw to like anything at all about walking up and down grocery store aisles in search of peanut butter or baked beans or gourmet salad dressing. But for those who don’t remember that far back, grocery shopping used to be a respected weekly ritual that has long since been lost to time.

Let me explain.

Back in the day, grocery shopping began by scouring the sales advertised in the local newspaper. Those advertisements generally appeared in the Wednesday paper because most people did their weekly grocery shopping once a week and that day was Saturday.

Why Saturday? Well, if folks had to work all week, Saturday was the day. Besides that, grocery stores were either not open or only open briefly on Sunday, the day a person was supposed to go to church, remember?

By carefully studying what local supermarkets offered on “special,” people could create elaborate shopping lists – on paper. Those lists would include items the family needed that week and what was “on special” in the meat, canned goods or paper products departments.

The actual shopping involved grasping the handle of a grocery cart, traipsing up and down each aisle, consulting the paper shopping list and using a pencil to strike a line through each item as it was deposited into the cart. If a shopper couldn’t find a particular item, there was always a cheerful stock boy - who had probably worked all night stocking shelves - nearby to locate it.

This procedure was repeated aisle-by-aisle until every item on the list was scratched off the list.

The entire operation could take hours because it also involved a weekly strictly observed social ritual. That’s because every one of a person’s neighbors was in the supermarket too and every shopper was required to stop mid-aisle and chat for anywhere from two minutes to a quarter-of-an-hour.

That was pretty long ago.

These days, the “cheerful stockboy” is a 17-year-old with a cell phone who is apparently annoyed that anyone has asked him to help locate an item by searching it on the supermarket app on his phone.

Then there is the cashier – formerly a woman, a visit to the cashier was the last stop on the grocery shopping excursion. Because she was also neighbor – or at least someone who “checked out” the shopper on a weekly basis – this process could take anywhere from two to 10 minutes because in between cash register clicks the checker would ask about the shopper’s family, her plans for the weekend and if another neighbor’s aunt’s dog was still felling under the weather.

These days it’s faster to scan items at the self-checkout, tap the front of a credit card and hurry out the door without making eye contact with another human being.

It’s more time efficient; I’ll give you that. But it’s not nearly as much fun.

That’s why people shop online, in their PJs in the middle of the night.