I Bagged My Own Groceries

Today I finally made the trek down to Superior Groceries for some much-needed milk, cheese, bread, and veggies. Every time I go, I'm reminded that grocery shopping here is a little different than when I'm used to.


At some of the grocery stores back home, it's not unusual to see women in their Lululemon yoga pants or Paige denim, walking the aisles their Tory Burch flats, an iPhone cradled to their ear as they try to push the cart with one hand and keep a kid inside it with the other. The whole ambience is warm and inviting. The floors are tiled.

QFC back home. Gourmet coffee dispensers on the left, cereals on the right.

Aisles are well-stocked with boxes of 100-calories snack packs and a myriad of organic and gluten-free products. There's a wine section with hundreds of bottles in a variety of price ranges. There are a thousand different kinds of cheeses, breads, and fruits available, all neatly organized and artistically arranged.

The frozen section at QFC.

It's not like that here. The store itself, called Superior, is quite a departure from the one my family frequents back home, and most likely a departure from the norm for the vast majority of my fellow students here as well. It's just...not quite as polished. Things are just kind of stacked around, piled high on the shelves, often in the original cardboard pallet in which they were shipped.

Superior. Random cereal and canned goods on the left, produce on the right.

Though stock levels are unpredictable, Superior carries two very different genres of products - there are some items clearly only purchased by USC students, but most are aimed at the surrounding community. A lot of it is ethnic foods, tailored to the Latino community. Some things are cheaper versions of brand foods I recognize, while other things I've never even heard of (what are binuelos? Horchata mix? Bolillo). Maybe not all of it is the quality you'll find at other places, but it's definitely cheaper ("You bag, you save!").

The frozen section at Superior.

The customers at Superior are a little different from the customers at QFC back home too. They buy different things, have different diets, different priorities as to what goes in the shopping cart. A lot of soda and chips and processed foods, not as quite as much produce (although the produce is remarkably inexpensive). At the register (mostly self-check-out), instead of reporting how much you saved with a membership card or whatever, the digital readout reports how much of your purchase is foodstamps-eligible.

This grocery store, this neighborhood -- they're different from what I'm used to. It's real, it's vibrant and yes, at times, gritty. Occasionally I'm thrust out of my comfort zone. This is a world outisde of my cozy, suburban bubble.

I'm learning a about a lot more than just English Literature here. And I like that.