All Because I Needed to Melt Some Chocolate

Days before Valentine's Day, I went into our local Wegman's grocery store to pick up some things and get an early start on finding the kind of chocolate I needed to make super delicious chocolate-dipped strawberries.  Wegman's is, without a doubt, the largest grocery store I've ever visited.  But it seems that since I moved up here I can never find some things because apparently grocers' ideas about where food should be positioned in a store is somehow altered if they're north of the Mason-Dixon line or something. Like garlic, though in the onion family, is sometimes with the tomatoes, and I just stand there, perplexed, in a sea of onions, wondering where on earth the garlic is.  Pine nuts are on the canned vegetable aisle- not with nuts.  The madness goes on and on.  So I checked in the strawberry section... no chocolate, except for some fondue, but it was all wrong.  For strawberry divineness, you must have the chips that you melt, and submerge the strawberry into, and then they solidify minutes later.  This is what makes the magic.  A bite into one of those juicy, chocolatey strawberries creates a taste bud explosion that is unmatched.  It's the pop of the chocolate, then the rush of sweet juiciness. I'm not sure why, but to me, Valentine's Day is synonymous with this whole pop and rush of strawberry.  It's like showing love to my mouth. ♥


So I wandered aimlessly around the store, as I often do, and never found it.  I began to worry that NJ didn't even know about this stuff, kinda like the Mount Olive sweet pickle relish crisis I experienced a while back.  So when I was checking out, I asked the cashier about the chocolate in question.  She knew exactly what I was talking about, and had just bought some in there recently.  It turns out, it's in the bulk candy section.  She told me she had no idea why they only put it there, and agreed that it should be next to the strawberries, for convenience for all the strawberry dippers out there.  I decided since I was already paying for the stuff she'd rung up, I'd just pick it up in a couple of days.  

It's important for you to know, that I'd never purchased anything in the bulk candy section of any store before. I can't stress this enough.  So please keep that in mind as this story continues to unfold.

Two days later, I was back.  We'd just come from church, and I was wearing high heels and needed to pick up a million things, it seemed.  I headed over to bulk candy, where I located the proper chocolates, and I was super stoked to realize they were available in dark chocolate, milk chocolate, and white chocolate, which they say isn't even really chocolate, but whatevs.  I bought some of each.  Having the freedom to scoop out the exact amount I wanted of each one made me feel as though I now possessed some great power. Then I bought other bulk candy items to give the kids for Valentine's Day, and some nuts, and some sprinkles, and some non pariels.  I didn't even know what a nonpareil was, but those sprinkle coated chocolates were about to complicate my life.


Soon I was in the checkout line, and things were moving so smoothly, until the 10 or so bags of bulk candy/nuts/pretzels had made their way down the conveyor belt.  Then there was mass confusion, and the speedy scanning came to a screeching halt.  There was a lot of weighing, then guessing going on.  And at one point, this poor incompetent guy asked if $2.00 was ok for the last 3 bags, total.  I agreed, but as we were walking out, I realized I'd been charged the nonpareil price, for the plain chocolates, which I remembered was a $3 difference per pound.  But before I said anything, I wanted to go back and confirm this was true, so as not to look like a big buffoon at the customer service counter.  Little did I know that ship had already sailed. So Steve loaded up the car, while I walked, or hobbled back to the candy section to pursue the big candy investigation.  My feet were screaming at me to just let it go and go home and convince Steve to give me a foot rub.   But I knew that I'd never know true peace until the chocolate/nonpareil mix up was resolved.


Moments later, I'm standing in customer service with bags and bags of candy, and I explained the whole hoopla about the candy-guessing at the register.  The receipt was such a mess, the guy couldn't even figure it out, so he refunded all the candy, and just started over.  Now, I knew what could happen..  It may turn out that I owe MORE.  And I did all of this just to have to fork out more money, but I didn't care.  I just wanted it to be right.  After 20 minutes of unringing up, and re-ringing up candies, another employee running to check a price, and all the refiguring, they owed me $10.25.  I felt it was well worth my effort to have a smart person fix it.  So I felt that I'd learned a valuable lesson about the bulk candy department-- write down the codes and attach to each product.. or just avoid those tempting, colorful bins of sugar-laden products altogether.

So then Valentine's Day was wonderful, and we ate a million strawberries.

Here's a couple of them that I was snacking on later.

A few days ago, I was back at Wegman's because I needed a bunch of stuff and Noah was begging for more yogurt dipped pretzels from bulk candies, which gave me anxiety.  So I'm shopping and feeling like a genius for easily locating some health food stuff I'd never bought before.  And then I returned to bulk candy..  While I was shoveling some sliced almonds into a bag, I happened to look up and saw a lady doing what appeared to be weighing stuff and punching numbers on a keypad.  What??  I'd not noticed this scale last time. As soon as she was gone, I eased over to it, hoping I'd just totally imagined the last couple of minutes, and sure enough, it's there so you can weigh your food, enter the item number, and it prints out a label to attach to your bag... Then I felt the stupid wash over me like a giant ocean wave on a summer day at the beach- only it wasn't refreshing and wonderful, and didn't leave me afraid that a crab would pinch my toe..

So here are the excuses I've made for myself, to make me feel less dumb:

1.  Steve was with me that night and he didn't notice either.  This is a big deal.  Steve is smarter than me, and has a freakishly creeptastic power of observation thing going on that most people don't even know about.  He's like that guy on that show "The Mentalist."  I jokingly call him a "mind reader," a term he probably doesn't enjoy. I should devote an entire blog post to this.  Though he mostly just uses this totally weird skill for predicting human behavior, he still pretty much knows what's going on around him. And Steve once worked in a grocery store, but they didn't have fancy shmancy contraptions like this.. 

2.  I'm still coming off of over 8 years of living in the backwoods of SC.  You can't just drop a country girl into the Philadelphia/South Jersey area and expect me to understand the intricasies of modern grocery shopping.  And if you live in SC, don't contact me and say, "Bilo and Ingles have those scales too!"  Just let me have this.

3.  Like I said before, I've never been in the bulk candy section before, of any store.  I can't emphasize this enough. And the one at Wegman's is big.  It would be easy to not notice a scale... or 2 scales...

You think it's SO noticeable?

Well what if you were standing HERE?  I see no scale.

But the real question here is, why didn't the cashier or the customer service people just say something like, "You know, moron, if you'd use the scale and print out a label, this wouldn't happen."??  Why aren't there signs on the candy bins that say, "Take your candy to the scale to avoid serious problems." ?

But through all of this, I discovered that I love buying from those bulk bins.  It's not just candy.  You can also buy many other foods- healthy foods.  It enables you to buy the amount you want and avoid the cost of packaging.  I will buy rice, nuts, grains, and whatever else this way from now on.

I hope everyone had a great Valentine's Day. We've been eating strawberries ever since that day, as we seem to turn the entire month of February into some kind of strawberry dipping free-for-all.  Because eventhough Valentine's Day passes, I still wake up and go to sleep every day with strawberries happily floating through my mind.