kevin_standlee (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kevin_standlee) wrote2022-04-10 05:05 am
kevin_standlee) wrote2022-04-10 05:05 am
Overnight Shopping
We once again aimed to avoid crowding for our "big grocery" run to WinCo Foods in Reno by going in overnight.
(For those people who have never encountered this concept: there are some grocery stores that are open round-the-clock. One of them is WinCo Foods, a regional warehouse grocery chain. I mention this because the last time I talked about one of these "midnight runs," there were people who read this journal who were flabbergasted by the concept of grocery stores open 24 hours.)
I got to bed as early as I could yesterday and set the alarm for midnight. We left for Reno about 1 AM. The store was more crowded than I would have liked, albeit mostly with people restocking shelves, none of whom were masked. At first, I thought that Lisa and I would end up being the only people in the store who were masked, but in the end we saw four others, not counting the person wearing a mask around the base of their chin.
Annoyingly, one of the most crowded sections was an aisle that had a whole lot of the canned goods we wanted to buy. We collected everything else we wanted, then waited until the staff finished their work so we could go get what we wanted and then check out. Ordinarily, the graveyard shift has only one checkout lane open. For whatever reason, there were so many other customers that they had three lanes open when we checked out and paid for our $230 worth of groceries. That's a lot for us, but we don't go grocery shopping as often as we did pre-pandemic, and we no longer regularly dine out in restaurants, so it evens out.
There is apparently a shortage of distilled water. The brands that used to be common on the shelves have been replaced by a different brand, and to my surprise, their gallon jugs of water are not quite the same shape/size as the previous ones, which themselves were the same shape/size as gallon jugs of milk.
From the level of traffic in the store, we tentatively have concluded that 1 AM is too early. It looks like 3 AM might have worked out better, as many of the overnight shelf-stockers appeared to be leaving around the same time we were.
We headed home (no worries about traffic at that hour), packed away the groceries, and Lisa headed for bed (she's been mostly sleeping days). I considered doing the same, but as it got close to my normal Day Jobbe starting time, decided to try and stay awake for a while longer. But I may well crash much earlier than usual today, and thanks to Day Jobbe, I already am on a different "shift" than most people expect of someone living in the Pacific time zone. (And yes, Nevada is mostly in the Pacific Time Zone. Remember that Reno is west of Los Angeles.)
(For those people who have never encountered this concept: there are some grocery stores that are open round-the-clock. One of them is WinCo Foods, a regional warehouse grocery chain. I mention this because the last time I talked about one of these "midnight runs," there were people who read this journal who were flabbergasted by the concept of grocery stores open 24 hours.)
I got to bed as early as I could yesterday and set the alarm for midnight. We left for Reno about 1 AM. The store was more crowded than I would have liked, albeit mostly with people restocking shelves, none of whom were masked. At first, I thought that Lisa and I would end up being the only people in the store who were masked, but in the end we saw four others, not counting the person wearing a mask around the base of their chin.
Annoyingly, one of the most crowded sections was an aisle that had a whole lot of the canned goods we wanted to buy. We collected everything else we wanted, then waited until the staff finished their work so we could go get what we wanted and then check out. Ordinarily, the graveyard shift has only one checkout lane open. For whatever reason, there were so many other customers that they had three lanes open when we checked out and paid for our $230 worth of groceries. That's a lot for us, but we don't go grocery shopping as often as we did pre-pandemic, and we no longer regularly dine out in restaurants, so it evens out.
There is apparently a shortage of distilled water. The brands that used to be common on the shelves have been replaced by a different brand, and to my surprise, their gallon jugs of water are not quite the same shape/size as the previous ones, which themselves were the same shape/size as gallon jugs of milk.
From the level of traffic in the store, we tentatively have concluded that 1 AM is too early. It looks like 3 AM might have worked out better, as many of the overnight shelf-stockers appeared to be leaving around the same time we were.
We headed home (no worries about traffic at that hour), packed away the groceries, and Lisa headed for bed (she's been mostly sleeping days). I considered doing the same, but as it got close to my normal Day Jobbe starting time, decided to try and stay awake for a while longer. But I may well crash much earlier than usual today, and thanks to Day Jobbe, I already am on a different "shift" than most people expect of someone living in the Pacific time zone. (And yes, Nevada is mostly in the Pacific Time Zone. Remember that Reno is west of Los Angeles.)
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