RIP Chicago Dominick's
If you live in Chicago, you're almost certainly aware that Dominick's is leaving. On Friday, not realizing that Dominick's had declared a giant sale of 50% off essentially everything that wasn't fresh, softlykarou and I went out for our Friday night shopping trip to pick up our CSA and hit Dominick's for the couple things we usually get there.
...huh. And apparently our local Dominick's was seriously hated. I never had that many complaints, but admittedly we do most of our shopping at other stores. Dominick's was just for stuff like the yogurt I like, toilet paper, the occasional special occasion card, ice cream, and...that's about it, really.
Anyway, we got inside and our first clue that something was strange was that there were no shopping carts in the front entry at all. Our second clue was the displays near the front being half empty, and our third clue was the giant crowds of people. I've never been shopping on Black Friday. I've only ever even participated in Black Friday once, back when I worked retail right after university, and I managed to avoid being trained to use the cash register so that I didn't have to deal with customers--in hindsight not really a wise idea for the hours I got, but since it's years later I don't care so much. The main thing I remember from that single day was taking clothes from the changing room, folding them, and returning them to the displays for essentially eight hours straight (minus lunchtime, fortunately) as a constant steam of people came through the doors and tore through the merchandise like a pack of rabid honey badgers.
I imagine the employees at Dominick's were feeling much the same. There were a lot of empty shelves, random foods stuffed wherever the people who had picked them up had been when they decided they wanted something different, carts stuffed to the brim jamming the aisles, mud all over the floor...it reminded me of what I imagine supermarkets must look like when a hurricane or heavy snowstorm is supposed to make landfall.
softlykarou and my diet doesn't really involve a lot of packaged goods, other than stuff like chocolate, so we didn't go quite as wild as a lot of people did. We did manage to find one kind of food that made us happy for the sale, though:
Cheeeese! \(^_^)/
We also checked the flour aisle because softlykarou wanted to grab some more almond flour to make some almond crackers, but that ended in failure. Basically the entire flour and baking preparation aisle was empty. There were a few bags of flour here and there, plus some scattered stuff that people had left there. Not surprising, I suppose--flour can go bad, and one of the few bad meals that softlykarou ever made me was only bad because it was made with rancid flour, but it's not the kind of thing most people who use it frequently have to worry about.
Then we sat in the check-out line for thirty minutes while it slowly crawled along and the people in the line next to us, who had gotten in at the same time, got through in ten minutes. Isn't that always how it goes? We actually went back yesterday to check for more cheese, apparently not having learned our lesson at all, and sat in another unmoving line for ten minutes before the person working the deli counter took pity on us and invited us over to use their register since we only had a half-dozen items.
"Serving the Chicago area since 1925" is written on the wall over the registers. Seeing it was a lot like that time when jdcohen mentioned seeing the workers outside a Wawa changing the sign to, "This Wawa has been injury-free for 0 days."
...huh. And apparently our local Dominick's was seriously hated. I never had that many complaints, but admittedly we do most of our shopping at other stores. Dominick's was just for stuff like the yogurt I like, toilet paper, the occasional special occasion card, ice cream, and...that's about it, really.
Anyway, we got inside and our first clue that something was strange was that there were no shopping carts in the front entry at all. Our second clue was the displays near the front being half empty, and our third clue was the giant crowds of people. I've never been shopping on Black Friday. I've only ever even participated in Black Friday once, back when I worked retail right after university, and I managed to avoid being trained to use the cash register so that I didn't have to deal with customers--in hindsight not really a wise idea for the hours I got, but since it's years later I don't care so much. The main thing I remember from that single day was taking clothes from the changing room, folding them, and returning them to the displays for essentially eight hours straight (minus lunchtime, fortunately) as a constant steam of people came through the doors and tore through the merchandise like a pack of rabid honey badgers.
I imagine the employees at Dominick's were feeling much the same. There were a lot of empty shelves, random foods stuffed wherever the people who had picked them up had been when they decided they wanted something different, carts stuffed to the brim jamming the aisles, mud all over the floor...it reminded me of what I imagine supermarkets must look like when a hurricane or heavy snowstorm is supposed to make landfall.
softlykarou and my diet doesn't really involve a lot of packaged goods, other than stuff like chocolate, so we didn't go quite as wild as a lot of people did. We did manage to find one kind of food that made us happy for the sale, though:
Cheeeese! \(^_^)/
We also checked the flour aisle because softlykarou wanted to grab some more almond flour to make some almond crackers, but that ended in failure. Basically the entire flour and baking preparation aisle was empty. There were a few bags of flour here and there, plus some scattered stuff that people had left there. Not surprising, I suppose--flour can go bad, and one of the few bad meals that softlykarou ever made me was only bad because it was made with rancid flour, but it's not the kind of thing most people who use it frequently have to worry about.
Then we sat in the check-out line for thirty minutes while it slowly crawled along and the people in the line next to us, who had gotten in at the same time, got through in ten minutes. Isn't that always how it goes? We actually went back yesterday to check for more cheese, apparently not having learned our lesson at all, and sat in another unmoving line for ten minutes before the person working the deli counter took pity on us and invited us over to use their register since we only had a half-dozen items.
"Serving the Chicago area since 1925" is written on the wall over the registers. Seeing it was a lot like that time when jdcohen mentioned seeing the workers outside a Wawa changing the sign to, "This Wawa has been injury-free for 0 days."