Toothpicks, Poison Spinach, and a Lewd Monkey
How to find what you want at a store while blind
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Automatic doors part, and fluorescent lights flood my already blurred vision as I step into a grocery store. I feel a vague sense of numbness because this will be tedious. I’ve already blocked off more time in my day than anyone should have to for food shopping.
I walk carefully, shortening the sweep of my white cane. I’ve learned through experience that store displays are sometimes top-heavy and precisely in the middle of walking paths. This is not my fault, but someone will act like it is if dozens of candy bags end up on the floor.
I go toward the sounds of checking out. Bar code scanners beeping, bags crinkling, people shouting “Price check!” I’m aiming for somewhere I know will have employees. I’m going to ask for someone to help me find my items, which isn’t an easy sell.
“Excuse me, would any of you employees who are paid less than a living wage and probably dislike being here want to stop what you’re doing, potentially shortening your break or lengthening your workday, to assist a blind shopper, something for which you were never trained and which will undoubtedly be awkward? Hello? Anyone?”
But someone takes pity on me, and gets on the intercom or yells at another employee to make something happen. They tell me that someone is coming and I should wait. Never more detail than that. Because nobody has more detail than that. There’s no process for this. It’s nobody’s job. I stand for a bit. If no one materializes, I decide when to ask again, and how pushy to be.
My shopping buddy arrives. They might be delightful and chatty, or an entertaining character. They might be irretrievably drowning in a mindless workday stupor caused by decades of their face being ground mercilessly into the asphalt by capitalism. Or something in between. Whatever their mood, they’re my companion for the next half hour.
We’re shopping now. I’m telling them what I need. They walk to the relevant section and look around. If they can’t find the specific thing I asked for, I wonder how much effort they put into looking. Occasionally, I’m about 100% sure they barely looked at all. But I have no way of knowing for certain. I could, I suppose, ask directly.
“Hey, when you looked for my item just now, did you do a good job? Rank yourself on a scale of 1 to 10 where 10 is a good job and 1 is what you did.”
But that would be rude. So I just give a little verbal nudge.
“Hmmm… it’s usually here…” I say, trailing off and, for some reason, moving my head around like I’m also looking.
My buddy might be moving efficiently. Or not. Sometimes very much not. Sometimes I suspect they are several turtles in a human suit.
Sometimes they don’t know what I want. Recently, I asked a guy at a drug store for floss. He handed me a bag that I could feel had those little plastic forks with floss between the two prongs. I don’t like those. The ratio of floss to environmentally toxic forever trash is pretty bad. I asked for a regular box of floss.
“A what?!” he said, in a tone of surprise that would have been appropriate if I had asked for a rhinoceros burger.
He looked for a few more seconds and handed me something that felt like what I wanted. But I got home and found I had a package of toothpicks. I should have pulled out my phone in the store and had it read me the label. It’s one of the only ways I can be sure what I’m getting. But it’s an uncomfortable option because of how clearly it communicates, “I have reached the conclusion that I do not trust you at all.”
And then, of course, there are the extreme cases. The people who really, truly, disastrously do not understand what I want.
Many years ago, I was looking for a card for a friend’s birthday. I was also trying to convince this friend she should date me. My shopping buddy was a very young man who was happy to help. In retrospect, maybe too happy. Most likely high. I told him I wanted to find a card that was funny.
“Okay, got it,” he said with an excited confidence. “Here, this one. There’s a topless woman.”
“Sorry, what?”
“Yeah, she’s lifting up her shirt and flashing her boobs.”
“You have a greeting card in this CVS that shows boobs?”
“Actually no,” he explained, “See you think it’s boobs, but there’s a hole in the first page of the card where the boobs are. Look, you can feel it.”
“I’m good.”
“So you turn the page and you find out that the boobs were from a different picture on the second page and they’re actually a monkey’s ass cheeks—”
“Sorry?”
“And the monkey is like smiling and wishing her a happy birthday, hahahaha.”
“Um… what else do you have?”
He kept describing cards in that vein. After three or four, I said, “Let’s actually find one that’s not funny.”
As an aside, in case you’re wondering, the friend I was getting the card for is now my wife. I won her heart by making thoughtful romantic decisions like not sending her a picture of a monkey’s ass.
I can, of course, avoid all these problems with the wide selection of grocery and retail delivery apps we have nowadays. But these too have issues. For instance, the occasional item that is about 48 hours past the point where it can be considered human food. Or labor practices worthy of the president. Or dynamic pricing, which is a euphemism for AI digging through your wallet until it hits bedrock. Plus, after you pay for the groceries and tip your delivery person, you get a delivery charge, a service charge, an administrative charge, a surge-pricing charge, a surcharge charge, an [insert charge name when we think of one] charge, and a penalty charge for exceeding the maximum number of charges.
But the in-store experience became so comparatively miserable that I mostly use the apps now. They are faster, less awkward, and don’t zap all my social energy for the next month. I try to make myself feel better about it by tipping well and ordering from the cheapest stores in delivery range. Then I just have to sporadically discard a bag of spinach because it’s growing the mushrooms from “The Last of Us.”
Unfortunately, when I only need to grab a couple things, I still have to resort to shopping buddies. Inevitably, as I ask a cashier for the third time whether anyone is coming, or I request tissues and get toilet paper, or someone insists that they looked around thoroughly and this grocery store does not in fact sell groceries, I remember why I don’t do this anymore.