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Rehovot Supermarkets: "Mega" Grocery Amusement Park
by Erin Israel, Rehovot.blogspot.com
"I go to the aptly named "Mega" grocery store this morning, and the place is a madhouse, just like the day before Thanksgiving, except these people are running around with carts of apples and honey instead of yams and mincemeat. Incidentally, Mega's carts are one and a half times the size of normal carts, so steering them is impossible, as the handle lies somewhere around your sternum. Most shoppers careen around the store with no more control of their vehicles than one has in a bumper-car ring. Attention, Israeli mechanical engineers: the grocery-cart industry needs you.
There's a giant sucking sound coming from the onions and potatoes stand. I wander over, and an employee with a green-and-white striped Mega vest is vacuuming the onions.
That's right, running a hose over the onions, swooshing out the skins. As I gaze in amazement, the employee, a man in his forties with a deep tan, pauses to hand me an onion, since I am evidently too dazed by such cutting-edge produce technology to reach in for one. A co-worker totters over and unloads a crate full of more onions onto the pile, and two fall out and land on my toes. When I go to clutch my digits in pain, I whack my head on the cart.
The employee with the vacuum hose clucks something sympathetic in Hebrew, leans over, and tries to help me with one hand; meanwhile, the hose starts sucking up the strand of plastic bags hanging from a spool over the onions. Flailing around with the hose, the employee yanks a whole line of bags off the spool, and then the fun really begins. The vacuum hiccups on one bag, and the employee, in grand Mega-style, weaves around the bags with the hose like Fred Astaire elegantly dodging Ginger Rogers' sleeves.
Everyone in the produce section, which is the size of a small suburb, stops to watch, carrots and cabbages poised above bags. Finally, the second employee dashes over to a large machine behind the green peppers bin and hits a button. The line of bags floats to the floor, and the first employee wipes his forehead.
What's the Hebrew for "slapstick"? For a five-shekel cart deposit, it's not a bad morning's entertainment, if you discount the injuries.
I replace the two offending onions, heave my cart away from the onion bin, and limp off. The rest of the shoppers in the produce section are shaking their heads and laughing; the two Mega employees are doing the same.
Nevertheless, not exactly the kind of moveable feast I was looking for..."
Source: Erin Israel. "ETS-ba ha-REH-gel." "The toe." Rehovot.Blogspot.com (2 October 2005) [FullText]
"I go to the aptly named "Mega" grocery store this morning, and the place is a madhouse, just like the day before Thanksgiving, except these people are running around with carts of apples and honey instead of yams and mincemeat. Incidentally, Mega's carts are one and a half times the size of normal carts, so steering them is impossible, as the handle lies somewhere around your sternum. Most shoppers careen around the store with no more control of their vehicles than one has in a bumper-car ring. Attention, Israeli mechanical engineers: the grocery-cart industry needs you.
There's a giant sucking sound coming from the onions and potatoes stand. I wander over, and an employee with a green-and-white striped Mega vest is vacuuming the onions.
That's right, running a hose over the onions, swooshing out the skins. As I gaze in amazement, the employee, a man in his forties with a deep tan, pauses to hand me an onion, since I am evidently too dazed by such cutting-edge produce technology to reach in for one. A co-worker totters over and unloads a crate full of more onions onto the pile, and two fall out and land on my toes. When I go to clutch my digits in pain, I whack my head on the cart.
The employee with the vacuum hose clucks something sympathetic in Hebrew, leans over, and tries to help me with one hand; meanwhile, the hose starts sucking up the strand of plastic bags hanging from a spool over the onions. Flailing around with the hose, the employee yanks a whole line of bags off the spool, and then the fun really begins. The vacuum hiccups on one bag, and the employee, in grand Mega-style, weaves around the bags with the hose like Fred Astaire elegantly dodging Ginger Rogers' sleeves.
Everyone in the produce section, which is the size of a small suburb, stops to watch, carrots and cabbages poised above bags. Finally, the second employee dashes over to a large machine behind the green peppers bin and hits a button. The line of bags floats to the floor, and the first employee wipes his forehead.
What's the Hebrew for "slapstick"? For a five-shekel cart deposit, it's not a bad morning's entertainment, if you discount the injuries.
I replace the two offending onions, heave my cart away from the onion bin, and limp off. The rest of the shoppers in the produce section are shaking their heads and laughing; the two Mega employees are doing the same.
Nevertheless, not exactly the kind of moveable feast I was looking for..."
Source: Erin Israel. "ETS-ba ha-REH-gel." "The toe." Rehovot.Blogspot.com (2 October 2005) [FullText]
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