I live near the flagship store of
Wegmans, the grocery chain ranked best in the US by Consumer Reports.
It earns its reputation across the board--competitive and consistent
prices, the quality and variety of goods they sell, how they treat
their customers, how they treat their employees, their contributions
to the community. It's all first-rate, as shopping experiences go.
There's another grocery store chain
here, with locations nearer to the less prosperous citizens, although
no stores inside the city itself. Not long ago they closed a fairly
decent location and opened a new store nearby. What the hell, we
thought. Let's shop there, try it out.
For a new store, the produce section
was tiny. Where Wegmans offers much variety within types of
foods--say, seven or eight types and sizes of tomatoes, five of
onions--this store had very little depth. Still, a lot of our list
was produce, so we bought what we could and made substitutions for
the rest. (OMG, we have to chop our own celery to make jambalaya!)
They had no field greens salad mix, no large bags of pre-made salad,
no heirloom tomatoes, no local berries, no pre-pared vegetables ready
to cook, no chunks of trimmed pineapple or melon.
Our next stop was the deli, where the
selection was smaller than Wegmans but still not bad, with some
brands Wegmans does not carry. I chose quickly, but the woman already
being served was buying a pound or more of several types of meats and
cheeses. There was only one employee working the deli, mid-day on a
Friday. She called a specific employee to come to assist, but he
never arrived. The woman already being served was aware how long I'd
been waiting and apologized; she was buying everything for a large
family reunion picnic. The lone employee finally went to another
department, apparently spoke to a manager, and brought back the
employee she'd called over who hadn't come on her say-so.
We continued our shopping, finding they
carried neither of the Popsicles we devour. Oh, well, it's not like
we're addicted. Just very, very dependent.
At the checkout, the lines were long.
We chose one where the woman in front of us had a large order. The
cashier was slow, the kind of uncaring employee who projects
I-hate-this-job and refuses to respond to any attempt at
pleasantry. (She wouldn't last long at Wegmans. Really, they're
uniformly either friendly or at least neutral.) She apparently rang
multiple items up more than once, which caused the customer to
correct her.
The cashier didn't like that and moved
even slower, never mind the people in line at her register who'd
caused her no problems. When it was time to pay, the customer's debit
card, credit card, and personal check were all rejected, even after a
front-end manager was called to run them. Now the cashier was in in a
visibly foul mood and made no attempt to hide it. She seemed to
resent having to scan our membership key tag--so much effort!--and
sighed largely at the imposition. She made no eye contact. She
coughed a fair bit, half-coverng it with her forearm.
Maybe it wasn't that she didn't give a
fuck about being a good cashier doing a good job representing her
store. Maybe she didn't feel well--in which case she most certainly
should not be handling my food.
Anyway, we were in line to check out,
our stuff on the conveyer belt, for at least twenty minutes. At no
time did anyone, including the front end manager who came to attempt
to process payment for the order before ours, apologize for the
delay.
Delays happen at Wegmans, too, but
there the front-end manager would have apologized and gotten someone
to unload our groceries from the conveyor into a cart and rung them
up on a register opened just for that purpose.
And the perfect ending: By eight that
night, so many of the strawberries and raspberries purchased mid-day
were molding or so soft they became semi-liquid on handling that we
estimate more than a third but less than half were inedible. By lunch
the day after purchasing bagged mixed salad, with its Best By a date
still six days in the future, the lettuce within the new sealed bag
was rusted, some of it rotting.
[There's no point in naming the other
store. If you know where Wegmans flagship store is, then you know
what store is the also-ran.]
And why am I sharing this here, besides
a nice healthy venting? Because I see it in aspiring writers. They
know their book--or poem, or screenplay, etc.--is not the best.
Instead of working on it until it can truly compete with those which
are excellent, these writers settle. It's good enough, they
tell themselves. I'm not trying to be J.K. Rowling, Khaled
Hosseini, Diana Gabaldon, Jonathan Franzen, Neil Gaiman, Susanna
Clarke, etc.--I just want people to enjoy my book. Or I don't
need content edits. People can tell what I mean even if the dialogue
isn't punctuated right every time. A few spelling or grammar errors
don't really matter. I'm going to make a simple cover and
self-publish.
But it
does matter. It matters a lot. I don't want your rotting salad and berries, or your coughing cashier who hates waiting on me. I want Wegmans!
