Will the New "Social Safeway" Impress Us?

Anyone who has lived in Washington, D.C., for at least five years probably understands what one is talking about when someone refers to buying groceries at the "Social Safeway." It's the Safeway that's located on Wisconsin Avenue in Glover Park, just above Georgetown.

The term Social Safeway was coined to refer to the fact that so many single people frequented that grocery store (but this has been less true in recent years because new groceries have opened in the Adams Morgan and Logan Circle neighborhoods).

Well, I picked up this morning's Washington Post to learn that the Social Safeway is going to reopen on Thursday. The article suggests that the new Social Safeway will be a grocery store worth shopping at, but I'll believe when I see it.

My memories of the Social Safeway (before it closed for this renovation) are pretty unpleasant ones. The produce that I usually found there years ago looked like it had just been through a hailstorm. The apples were waxed to death, and it was hard to find varieties beyond the mass-produced Golden Delicious, Red Delicious and McIntosh varieties. Also the floors in the Social Safeway were usually filthy.

The article refers to a sushi bar and gelato stand being part of the new store. Sounds appealing, but it's hard to imagine. I think my attitudes are so poisoned against the Social Safeway that it's hard for me to believe that the "new" version will really offer foodies a quality, overall shopping experience. I'm skeptical, but I will probably give it a chance.

Stop the Stickers . . . Please

It seems that unless you go to a farmers' market, you can't buy a piece of fruit anywhere that doesn't have a sticker on it -- sometimes more than one.

Usually, the stickers give you information that you already knew from the sign that appeared in the grocery store. If you're interested in eating a piece of fruit out of hand, it gets annoying having to look for the sticker and pull it off. And sometimes those stickers can be difficult to peel off without digging your finger into the fruit.

As this N.Y. Times article explains, I'm not the only one who has found this frustrating. An elderly woman from Clarksville, Tex., voiced this complaint:

"I was picking all the little stickers from the Piggly Wiggly off my plums and my avocado pears and my peaches. Then I had to make fruit salad out of the ones that got hurt when I took the stickers off, and then I had to wash the glue off the other ones before I put them in the fruit bowl."

I love her choice of words -- "the ones that got hurt." How pervasive is this? Well, check out this photo that someone posted on Flickr, and you get a sense for how sticker-happy the grocery stores have become.

Grocery chains need to stop doing this. It's annoying as hell. Let your signs tell us what kind of pear or peach that is. Stop slapping stickers on everything.