Little Stop & Shop of Horrors
by Rachel Lagodka

    OK I couldn’t find my camera and two friends from DC came by unexpectedly, and someone was calling me to see if I needed a ride to the wildly billed grand opening of Stop & Shop in New Paltz, when my original ride pulled up and beeped the horn. I ran to the car with my husband’s flip-flops on and a towel on my head because I had just gotten out of the shower. My friend said something about the towel like “You can’t go in there with a towel on your head you’ll look like a crazy person!”—but she didn’t notice the giant flip-flops.  My tape recorder’s batteries were dead. So I didn’t interview anyone for this blog but there’s a certain amount of solipsism to be expected in a blog anyhow. When we approached the plaza we entered a slowly snaking gridlock of cars and mini-vans and SUVs.

There were no parking spaces to be had. My friend convinced me to drop her off and search for parking myself. The seat was too close to the pedals so I tried to adjust it as I followed a line of cars inching around the back of the building. There was no parking to be had there either, in fact the passage was blocked off at the end with cones and had these strange green plastic cylinders which I thought I had enough room to pass. It had been a while since I’d driven a van. Whatever the green plastic thing was, it shattered spectacularly, sending shards of green plastic all over the place with a loud crunching sound. I tried to park the van where the cones were, but a guy in a plaid shirt with a beard driving a Bobcat told me that I had to turn around or someone was going to hit me. I sheepishly told him I was a bad driver and it wasn’t my van anyhow and made the turn in just under a dozen moves. I parked back there behind a long line of cars and ran in.

I immediately wished I had my camera. A very slick mustachioed manager stood outside beaming like a circus barker. I walked in the door and was smacked nearly senseless by the bright lights, the utter hugeness, the teeming humanity, parents and their offspring lined up for giant meatballs in an orange sauce and sparkling cider from a fountain. A three piece band was playing, rather well, old standards like “Beso Mi Mucho” and I can’t remember what else as I plunked myself down into a resilient chair, scared of this alien thing, this artificial place, this intrusion of the big corporate world into my small town. Families swarmed, clearly the place had attracted them and they were enjoying themselves, desultoriness increasing with age. I bristled with the fear that this was in fact a human trap set there by diabolically evil aliens. The consumer goods and the giant meatballs were there to trap us like the sweet smelly glue in an ant trap or the poison pellets in a cockroach motel.

I suppose this is a better human trap than Shop-Rite so the big corporate alien will eat the little one eventually. If I were gainfully employed to write about this I would research the various pros and cons of shopping at each store. For now all I can say is that I heard Shop-rite gave us 5k for the fireworks and Stop & Shop gave us nothing. Both have unions, but Shop-Rite drug tests (an unconscionable intrusion) and Stop & Shop does not.

I suppose if I had to choose a war, a price war would be a preferable kind while it lasted. I just hope that New Paltz gets less expensive food out of the deal, and not that people begin to mysteriously disappear until one day a child with a laser gun bursts in to find their desiccated bodies suspended from the ceiling in sticky white cocoons.

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