Coded green.

Saturday 10 August 2002

Rowan with berries

Pic of the day: The birds can get their groceries right here on the tree, but for some of us it's slightly more complicated ...

Grocericity

Usually I buy some groceries on Saturday. The last few weeks I have bought them at the Kiwi supermarket at Langenes. It may be small for a supermarket, but it still has a much wider selection than the small family grocery closest to where I live. And the food is better refrigerated. Kiwi seems to excel in that, with a few exceptions. On the downside, it is half an hour's walk each way, compared to a quarter of an hour in the opposite direction for the old family shop.

Today I felt lazy and decided to go to the small shop again. It was a warm day despite the light cloud cover, and I was glad I didn't have to walk an hour just for a few yogurt and a soda. Then I came to the shop, and something was wrong. There were no cars outside, and the windows were dark and empty. During my few weeks of absence the shop was closed down.

I came home hot and sweaty ("sweat is nature's way of telling you that you don't stink enough"). No way was I going to set out for another hour of walking in this weather! Instead I waited and took the bus to Tangvall, the small but modern town that is the center of our municipality. I had half an hour before the next bus home. (I use the word "home" a bit loosely, as it is another 12 minutes walk from the bus stop to my basement apartment.) Now at Tangvall I immediately set my course for the local Kiwi supermarket. Yes, they have one there too. Or had – again the windows were dark and empty. I immediately suspected that they had lost out in the competition with the other supermarket chains which were clustered in the same quarter. After all, most shops store the groceries at 5 to 10 degrees warmer than recommended; surely the difference in electricity bills had driven Kiwi out of business...

But there was a handwritten sign on the door, and I moved closer and read it. It turned out that they had only moved across the road from the main market square, into a new large building that is still in the process of being finished. Like the rest of the new buildings here, it has apartments on the upper floors and shops at ground level. This seems to have worked well enough this far, but I wonder whether there will be enough customers for all those shops when the current economic boom in Norway starts to fade. The complexes themselves are too low to contain enough customers, not by far. And most of the people in our municipality work in the city of Kristiansand, so are likely to shop there.

Anyway, I found the new Kiwi shop and got all the groceries I needed or wanted. So all ended well... except for the small family shop, the only one in half an hour's walk in any direction. (Not that anyone except me walks to buy groceries anyway.) You can't stop time, can you?


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