It's Only a Freakin' Supermarket, People!

From the cars circling for parking outside, you'd thought it was the second coming and Jesus was personally handing out free sushi inside.

But no, it was simply the opening of a new Wegmans -- the first of the chain in this corner of suburbia. Evidently this store is the closest thing to nirvana for the SUV set.

The store opened on Sunday, and on Monday my little family happened to be across the street. The manly husband had been monitoring the progress of the Wegmans throughout its construction and he was itching to check out the interior...to see if it was all it was cracked up to be.

Me? I was a little less enthused about entering, since it meant we would surely be outnumbered by the overprivileged. But enter we did.

Word is that Wegmans has great prepared food. But I can't confirm that, since the prepared food area was as crowded as Disney World during Spring break.

Since the swarming masses in prepared food were starting to make me hyperventilate, we detoured into the regular supermarket area...did a little grocery shopping -- and that part of the store was like combining Whole Foods type fare (at seemingly better prices) with your basic name-brand normal foodstuffs.

So, I was fairly impressed, even as my fight or flight responses kicked in. There I was, muttering, "It's just a supermarket..." under my breath, while what seemed like half the zip code vied for aisle position.

The straw that broke my psyche's back was during checkout, when the lady (and I use that a term loosely) behind me believed she was entitled to push her shopping cart into me (and leave it pressed against me) as I struggled to scribble something vaguely resembling my signature on the credit card machine. I pushed back, by the way -- but she either was oblivious or too much in a hurry to care.

"Must...get...out...now!" I thought to myself. Actually, that's not true -- I was saying it out loud -- along with, "Let's go -- NOW!"

Maybe if I hadn't spent two hours in the dentist's chair earlier that day I would have been in a better mood to deal with the maddening crowd.

And what had my dentist and her assistant been talking about as the drill invaded my mouth? Going to Wegmans, of course.