This is the story of how one woman with a cell phone turned a simple shopping trip into a big weird thing for the employees of WinCo, and bought some vegetables and ramen. And a few canned goods. And pepperoni, and grits.
I love to do photo store tours. The best one I did was way back in the old days on my blog Paul Because 'Paul' is a nice name. That store no longer exists. But it sold pig faces. It literally sold pig faces.
So with a hearty Hi Ho and three Gabapentin onboard, we leap into the present, and HOLY CRAP here we are, just like magic, right inside the doors of WinCo Foods!
WOW
I would have taken a picture of the outside but it was raining.
Why did I choose WinCo? Because it sells the cheapest groceries in town. I always shop here first.
Note the surveillance camera - kind of an egg-shaped half black, half white thingy hanging down top center. They are all over the store. Do I care? No. I'm not stealing. I'm not decompensating. I'm not naked. I am taking pictures...for science.
As it turns out, WinCo, a store that will literally let whole families come in and eat cheese shreds out of the dairy case, and not turn a hair, was not at all happy about me taking pictures for science. But onward!
Like I said, unapologetically grim. Well-lit, though. They give you a plastic shopping cart. It too is unapologetically grim. HA is what I say to that. And here are all your heavily tattooed working-class people trying to save a buck, and hopefully getting ready to do a little comparison shopping.
In WinCo, you better go in with a strategy. Yes, there's bargains - good ones - but there's a lot of blatant chicanery too. Right off the bat, the worst, cheesiest, most dishonest thing about WinCo is their store brands.
...your basic McDougals Cream of Spider Monkey for a buck seventy-seven. Same weight. But vastly different in quality. All soups are not created equal. They don't all come from the same factory. In this case you need to pay for that quality and not just go by price. PARTICULARLY when it comes to the WinCo store brand, kids.
Simply put, Winco's house brand is GARBAGE. And this you'll find with most of the Winco store brand products - they either blow, or they're short-weighted, or both.
Here's another example of how hard they work you at WinCo:
Hey look! There's a roasted chicken in a bag! And it costs...5.98. -but OK, OK fine, you pay for convenience!
Except that this chicken weighs one pound and thirteen ounces.
Look at this ridiculous thing.
This is a baby chicken. It is practically foetal.
....aaaaaaaaaaand this is where I picked up an observer. WinCo's security call code is 'Meat Section, all Service, line one'. I heard that go out, had time to wonder what was going on, and then realized that I was what was going on when a guy popped out from the back and began to follow me around. And was not at all cool about it.
Yup. They called a storewide code on me!
It's kind of an honor.
I decided to take a picture of my shopping basket and then act like I was talking on my phone. Trying to give the impression that I was shopping for someone, you see. Perfectly reasonable. Not a spy sent from Hagens to price-check your starved little rotisserie chickens, or whatever you think I'm doing, WinCo. Geeze.
So here ^^^ is my shopping so far! Lots of fresh veggies jammed into the baby seat up there, and a big ol' thing of ramen.
I do love WinCo for produce. They have the best selection in town except for the Food Co-Op, and you don't have to pay inflated hippie prices either. HA is what I say to hippie prices.
Now I'm going to digress. And I'm going to do it badly, with lots of side tangents. OK. This vvv is a picture of the Breakfast Cereal aisle. Just Breakfast Cereals here. Those huge silver tubes sticking up? Are filled with vampires. Maybe not. I don't know.
To the extreme right of shot there are the cereals that can, at a stretch, be described as all-grain. (You can see the things of oatmeal along the bottom. It's a narrow little strip going up from those.) Everything else, literally as far as the eye can see on both sides of this aisle, are sugar cereals.
This aisle is as long as one city block. No shit.
Now at the very end you can see a big ol' sign that says BULK. And right underneath that 'Bulk' sign is...
OH YIKES look at this ^^^ jacked-up picture of the Rice Krispies elfie guys. What happened to them? They used to be so robust! Now they look like haunted K-pop anorectics.
OK I'm getting sidetracked. Still, though. WTF, Kellog.
Now here we are finally in the bulk section. And I'm getting sidetracked again.
I am a huge fan of the WinCo bulk foods section, and if you have a WinCo in your town, you should be too. It is always fresh, usually pretty clean, and they have an incredible selection. For spices, definitely. The baking selection is phenomenal. It's all Bobs' Red Mill products!! HELL YEAH BOBS RED MILL MILWAUKIE yeaaaaaah GO OREGON WOOT WOOT WOOT
They even have twirly rainbow noodles! I always get some. The good thing about bulk pasta is, even if a little boogery kid has been rooting around in the bin, you have to boil pasta, so you probably won't get a boogery little kid disease from it.
Just purse your lips and whistle, that's the thing!
So anyway. On with the rant, with a side of surveillance!
The Bulk Foods section means candy in bulk, too. And here right below the 'Bulk' sign at the very end of the Yellow Brick Sugar Cereal Aisle of Valhalla...we find this vvv
Bulk candy. This display ^^^ is nine feet tall. No banana for scale. Bananas aren't that tall. Anyway this ^^^ is a nine foot tall wall of candy. And I have just passed through another aisle in the Bulk Food section to reach this edifice. It is this aisle vvvv which is all candy.
And here we have one of five endcaps in the Bulk Food section. Solid candy.
Oh look.I just turned around and here we have carriers vvv in the middle of the aisle. Twin carriers filled with...what?
CANDY.
^^^^ about that picture: That guy in the black hoodie center top is the one who came out of the back with a shopping basket and was following me around keeping an eye on me. Man, I had to get a shot of him. This poor dude.
OK he turned aside like he was pretending to look at the coffee so I whipped around and took this shot real quick
vvvvv
Here on these stackers we have yet more candy - and in the double carriers just behind it too!
So what do we have. Hmm. I didn't get pictures of it all because I was pretty distracted by this point. But it comes down to something like this:
One vast aisle filled with sugar cereals.
Two rows, front and back, full of candy.
All along the back wall, another row.
A row of double carriers four stacks long. So eight carriers.
Five end caps, all candy.
One random stack of upside-down candy
Another double carrier behind that.
I didn't bother getting more pictures of all the random shelf-hangers full of candy scattered all over the store .
I'm not even counting the two floor-to-ceiling rows of cookies, crackers and chips.
Or the wall of freezers stocked with ice cream.
Or the huge aisle that's a full city block long and floor the ceiling pop.
Come on! We wonder why Americans are obese?
______________
So I am wandering around in WinCo and I am being observed by 'The Meat Department'. OK then. I'll....shop, dammit. Except I don't have much more shopping to do. I got my twirly noodles and have moved on.
As long as I'm near the poultry coolers, I'll take a shot of the giant turkeys.
Now I'm really wishing I had a banana for scale because these things are freakishly huge. And frozen solid. Like boulders. (That bin is clean; that's just frost.)
This is the smallest turkey in this bin and it's almost twenty one pounds, the size of a one-year-old kid. My daughter was walking already when she was that size. This turkey was too...somewhere in Harbin.
So here I am in the checkout line with my groceries, me and all the other heavily tattooed people.
Now WinCo is a bargain mart, so yeah, you get the occasional freak job, and yeah, there's roving mutant families; that's anywhere lately. It's not Wal-Mart bad - I refuse to shop there - but it can get lively. Today, I am the lively. Well, I am a little bit of the larger lively. The checkout manager (to my rear, I just passed him) gave me the fisheye and talked into a phone as I pulled into this line, so I smiled....
...then I looked straight up and smiled again and took another picture of their surveillance camera.
Dammit, I was in a mood by now. Feeling kind of devil may care. Go ahead. I dare you to haul me into the back. Do it. C'mon.
But they didn't. You know why?
Me either.
BUT WE HAD FUN, DIDN'T WE?
Really, that's it. I bought a few groceries and took a few pictures, and got followed around by store security.
Isn't the first time. Won't be the last.
