Goodnight, ShopRite

(6-minute read, or listen)

“Oh did you hear? The ShopRite is closing.” 

I had heard it many times that week. I’d repeated it even more. 

Still it didn’t seem possible. Of course no one shopped at ShopRite. But the thing was, no one had ever shopped at ShopRite. 

For over a decade it was our town’s Bermuda Rectangle: A vast plaza where the law of supply and demand simply didn’t apply. 

When they first built it, disturbingly close to our existing supermarket, Price Chopper, the ShopRite was a monster. You could park medium-sized galaxies in that lot. We figured Price Chopper was a goner. Then years came and went in which no human voice even whispered the phrase ”I’m going to ShopRite, need anything?” But when you glanced over at it as you left Price Chopper with your groceries for the week, it was still there, the lights were still on.

Until Friday, anyway.

Because it hadn’t folded in six months like it should have, we’d thought we had all the time in the world. Now my wife and I got misty and planned to go for one last hurrah, which was also our first hurrah.

We went after dinner on a Tuesday. But it was October, so it felt like midnight. The aisles were three carts wide. We went up and down all of them, searching the shelves for meaning. The walls in the ShopRite were yellow and brown. In Price Chopper they were blue and gray and white. That was the main difference. 

Our ShopRite’s existence was so pointless that it was actually kind of beautiful.  

The only way we could express everything we felt inside at that moment was to buy a loaf of rye bread and leave. 

Hurrah.

Now when we pass the concrete ghost formerly known as ShopRite, we play that game you play when you get bored of where you live. The game is called You Know What They Should Put There? The first player makes a retail suggestion. The second player replies with an even more specific suggestion to top it, and so on.

You know what they should put there? A bagel place.

Yeah, but a bagel place that’s also a toddler gym.

What would be great though is a bagel place that’s a toddler gym that serves cocktails, so parents can get buzzed while the kids play. 

Oh, oh: A place that only sells alcohol-infused cream cheese!

Play continues until both players are satisfied that they are geniuses who will eventually, somehow, become rich.

We loved our ShopRite, in a way.

We loved it in the same knotted way that we love Wild Bird Junction. They sell birdseed and songbird supplies from a cozy, expensive building on Delaware Avenue. Once I saw a car in their parking lot. Maybe they do a good online business. Maybe it’s an elaborately twee money laundering front for the Sinaloa Cartel. 

Or iFillInk, the store that supposedly refills printer ink cartridges. It’s in a 1920s brick storefront right on our main intersection. A boozy cream cheese joint would do great there. But its big retail window is papered over with pro-Ukranian posters and the front door is permanently locked. No one has any clue who the I in iFillInk might be. 

We have enough places to buy stuff. They all make sense.

But it’s the places that don’t make any sense that make a town into your town.

The ShopRite space will be empty for a long while. Which is good. We need the time to wonder, and to re-tell the story that isn’t really a story.

Eventually, when a new business does move into the old ShopRite, I hope it’s something really, really stupid.