Grocery Stores and Relationships
We have a local grocery store (D&W) that I go to because it's convenient. It's not my favorite, but it's close.
I went there yesterday for one item--a protein shake. They'd moved their location, and in the last few weeks, significantly changed the product mix, so what I was looking for was no longer available. Plus I got sent to the wrong aisle by the first person I asked.
I was so annoyed I just walked out. Rage-quit a grocery store.
This has been building up for a long time, because the shopping experience at D&W has steadily declined, and it's fallen off a cliff in the last year. Product mixes and locations change constantly. Everyone gets shunted to the self-checkout lanes (because there's never more than one regular checkout lane out of 5+ ever open), but the scanners are last-gen (at least five years old and probably closer to ten), which means at least 1/3 of my trips involve someone from customer service having to come over to assist. There are another half-a-dozen problems I won't even waste your time describing.
It wasn't one experience that made me walk out of the store. It was the accumulation of grievances over time.
I was getting in the car and suddenly realized how much my relationship with D&W was like my marriage.
It was never what was happening at the moment that caused the biggest problems. Rather, it was the accumulation of grievances over time that neither one of were ever able to deal with, even when we tried (and we did try). Both of us had grievance mountain, after a decade or so, and those mountains never got smaller. So when a little thing happened, it was easy to get upset, because it was a little thing on top of a mountain.
With anyone, under any circumstance, if you can't deal with problems and resolve them, it's not a healthy relationship. It's the biggest red flag of all.
You can't resolve grievances with a grocery store. You can (and should) with people.
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