Vegetable Buying - Redefined!

Another weekend ends. This weekend had all the essentials of a good weekend - an evening out with friends, a good amount of personal and household work accomplished, a nice trek to Sinhagad on a cloudy summer day and an evening full of rest. I had planned on writing a little more on the topic of blogging, but now another interesting experience needs telling.

This experience of which I talk about, which was a rather interesting part of the weekend was buying vegetables for the house. Well no, I am not saying this was interesting because this was the first time I have bought any (I am not that hopeless you see). It was interesting for me because it was the first time that I bought them at a supermarket.

Until now all my vegetables buying experiences were at the local markets - either Shivaji market or Pulgate market. Buying vegetables at such places was nothing short of a mission. I had to go mentally prepared to survive in a noisy, crowded marketplace, with the end goal being procuring self-picked vegetables at not the most expensive price available and in the shortest time possible. The brain needed to tune itself to enter a filthy narrow corridor of a public market between hordes of fruits and vegetable sellers screaming out the prices of their wares to the whole world. The intention behind their screaming seemed more to outdo their peers in the exercise rather than attract customers. The 15 minutes spent there bargaining, selecting, ensuring the correct weighing and eventually buying the vegetables would end up being the most arduous part of the day.

This time I bought vegetables at a quiet spacious air-conditioned store (named 'more' or something like that) with polite staff ready to help you with every task with gleaming smiles. There was no need to haggle, no need to try and select the good vegetables from the bad (all the vegetables appeared to be of a reasonable quality) and no need to lend a hawk's eye to inspect the process of weighing and packaging. This was smooth sailing all the way from the entrance to the shopping and back to the exit... Well, almost smooth - being a little rusty in the vegetable nomenclature, I did confuse a couple of vegetable names, but I am sure that would not take anything from the feat achieved by buying a scooter-load of vegetables effortlessly without going through the motions of a battlefield-like marketplace.