Trader Joe's opened on the Upper West Side earlier last week. And it was a big deal. Well there are other Trader Joe's in town, but much farther from me and I heard the lines just to get in were crazy - like it's an exclusive club!
For those of you who don't know, Trader Joe's comes from California! Woohoo! It is headquartered in Monrovia, a hop skip and jump away from my hometown. I've been going to TJ's since as far back as I can remember (in the 1980s!) when my neighborhood Trader Joe's was just basically a liquor store with a couple of aisles of nuts, cheese, and dairy products, and that was about it. It has grown and expanded substantially since then.
In the past few years, I've been eating food and buying groceries almost exclusively from Trader Joe's, to the point where, why, just a couple of months ago I was complaining about the lack of variety. I have heard of people who disliked TJ's. OK one person. I was flabbergasted. I mean, some items, admittedly, are hit or miss. But the "miss" items go away quickly, as they are always coming up with new items. Unfortunately, some good things go away and never come back (oh, guacamango salsa! and coffee-flavored soy milk!). Since TJ's opened in Westwood, I found myself stopping by there several times a week on my way home. One day (why, just a couple of months ago), I stood in front of the prepared foods section, and looked at every single salad and sandwich they had. And it dawned on me, I had had every single item on the shelf!
Now that it's been over a month since I've had TJ's, I excitedly got on the 1 train on a Friday morning just to shop there. It's very strange. So it's on three stories. The first story is just the entry level, and there is nothing there except the escalator to go down. The "main" level has dairy, produce, and the checkout stations (I say stations for a reason). The lower level has the other stuff. Note, there is NO wine or hard liquor. Some kind of weird law in NYC prevents grocery stores from selling any wine or liquor (but they can sell beer). I guess because the lines can get very long, there is actually someone standing at the end of the line with a sign that says, "end of the line." Then, instead of checkout lanes, there is just one lane and they call out the cashier numbers when there is one free. e.g., "29!" and you go to station 29. All of the chocolate/candy that you would normally see at every checkout station is, instead, consolidated to one shelf at the "end of the line" - it's very strange.
Shopping in NYC has a real old world feel to it, where people went to specific stores just to buy specific items (it's a lot of work!). Since I was disappointed that I couldn't buy any wine (not even $3 two buck Chucks, which apparently they have at a TJ's Wine Shop in Gramercy, aka far from me) I have been craving wine. Not that I even drank that much wine back in L.A.! Something about not having something easily available, makes you want it more...
Going to TJ's brought some feelings of comfort. Comfort in seeing familiar products. Even comfort in the decor. And comfort in consuming the familiar products (even though they had only a fraction of the salads and sandwiches they had back in L.A.). I'll talk about "comforts" more in the next post...such as my comforting bowl of ramen from Mitsuwa in New Jersey:
But that's another story.
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