One thing leads to another

Fred Meyer was a local grocery chain when I grew up here in Seattle, but now it's part of the enormous and evil Kroger empire of high prices and narrow selection. Freddy's, though, is the only store that's let me order online for delivery, without paying InstaCart's ridiculous fees. They offer free delivery with no mark-up from store-shelf prices for any order $35 or more, which means all of my deliveries from Freddy's have been barely over $35. Twice I've hit $35 on the penny.

That's why Kroger fired me, I think — I wasn't a profitable enough customer. Since the day after Christmas, their website's been telling me "your address is invalid for delivery" — the same address they've delivered to a hundred times.

Wondering whether it was personal, I logged in and changed my address to the library, six blocks further from the store than my house. Kroger was happy with that, but I don't want my groceries delivered to the library.

I've wasted about three hours dealing with Kroger's 'customer service' department, and there's never a straight answer.

In one email, someone at Kroger pasted in two standard responses back-to-back — first saying their IT Department was aware of the problem and working on it, and the next paragraph suggesting I clear cookies, reboot, log out and log in again, etc (all of which I'd already done).

I replied, "Which is it, a software problem on Kroger's end, or a cookie problem on my end? It can't be both," and that was the last I've heard from Kroger.

So now I'm shopping like Granddad shopped, inside a physical grocery store (but not Fred Meyer) crowded with other idiots blocking the aisles with their carts. And other than the annoyance of shopping in a store, I'm happier not giving my money to Kroger, so I ain't even complaining.

♦ ♦ ♦

One bad thing usually leads to another, though. My first real-life shopping trip since 2022 was also the first time I'd used my debit card, in person, for at least that long — and at the self-serve checkout, I momentarily forgot my PIN.

Two minutes later I remembered the magic number, tried again, and bought my groceries. Next day, though, came an email from my credit union, which I'll quote in its entirety:

    Recently, your debit card was declined because the PIN was entered incorrectly. We're sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.
    If you don't remember your PIN, call the number on the back of your card to request a reminder or choose a new PIN.
    If you believe that this was an unauthorized transaction, please contact us as soon as possible at 800-562-8130.

It's a form-letter via email, reassurance that there's no problem, right? Wrong. The email neglected to mention that they'd cancelled my debit card.

Coupla days later, I was denied the right to purchase Twinkies on my debit card in the break room at work, so I called the credit union, and a nice lady on the phone said that my debit card had been reported lost or stolen.

She believed me when I said the card was still in my wallet, neither lost nor stolen, but she said the card had been permanently killed. It was deader than Generalissimo Francisco Franco, and could not be revived. I'd need to visit a branch office, she said, to be issued a new debit card.

"Why didn't the email tell me that?" I asked.

"I dunno," she explained.

♦ ♦ ♦

Of course, working for a living I couldn't get to the credit union until Saturday, and meanwhile, one bad thing usually leads to another.

Since they'd killed my card, the payment for refills on my ongoing prescriptions had bounced. My meds are usually mailed to me by Bob Johnson's Pharmacy, an old-school independent business I'd seriously recommend, but even Bob doesn't give away meds without payment.

I have gout, the old man's disease, and took my last anti-gout pill on Wednesday. Going a few days without my pills builds up to crippling pain, leaving me barely able to walk, so come Saturday morning I felt the first, very slight twitches of pain in my ankles as I stood in line at the credit union, a few minutes before they opened. 

They replaced the "lost or stolen" debit card, so my next mission was getting my meds, and with the pain of gout seeping into me, mail order was not an option. Instead I spent the morning into the afternoon on four long bus rides to and from the pharmacy's only location, way up in north Seattle. Two hours getting there, two hours getting back.

When they gave me the pills, I swallowed two inside the store. There's a new debit card in my wallet, and I'm shopping once weekly at a reasonably priced grocery store not owned by Kroger, so most of my major problems have been solved.

♦ ♦ ♦

From all of this there's only one maybe-amusing anecdote to be told:

Toward the end of Saturday's four-hour bus odyssey, I transferred between buses at 3rd @ Bell Street, one of the city's sketchier stops, in Belltown (or as it's better known, Bumtown).

It's not my normal bus stop, but I've waited there half a dozen times, and there are always plenty of bums standing around, smoking cigarettes, drinking whiskey, telling each other bum jokes, and occasionally but mildly hassling non-bums who intrude on their space by walking on the sidewalk or waiting for a bus.

Behind the bus stop, behind the bums, and behind more and thicker bars than the county jail, you'll find Dan's Belltown Grocery, which is not owned by anyone named Dan. All the workers are Middle Eastern, the prices are stratospheric, and they post snapshots of all the shoplifters they've caught on a "wall of shame." And they sell fried chicken, which smelled edible and I was hungry, so I bought a box of six tenders.

It's a 45-minute ride home, so I thought I'd microwave the meat and eat in my recliner, but on the bus I got a rare solo-seat, where nobody could sit beside me. WTF, I was hungry, and decided to eat my chicken on the bus. It's against the rules, signs are posted, but I'm a rebel.

Anyway, a lady was eating a hamburger and a bum was smoking fentanyl. Just an ordinary ride on Metro.

To my serious surprise, the overpriced chicken from not-Dan's Arabian mom & pop Bumtown convenience store was credible — no nominations for any awards, but it was tasty, crunchy, slightly spicy, and fairly fresh chicken. Not a bad biscuit, either.

As the #99 bus rolled through the long stretch of bum tents and cardboard mansions, trash and panhandlers in the ruins of Third Avenue, we stopped at Cherry Street to pick up more bums. I was munching my third piece of chicken when a bum ambled down the aisle and said to me, "That smells good, can I have a piece?"

Fuck off is my natural response to almost anyone asking almost anything, but with half a second to think it through, it seemed to me that asking for a piece of chicken falls under the five dollar rule:

Ask for spare change, and if I can spare it and you look worse off than me, I'll give you five bucks. Well, that guy had only asked for a piece of chicken, and he needed it more than me — I can survive on five chicken tenders instead of six — so I handed him a piece. I did not give him five dollars, though.

"Thanks, man," he said, and settled into the seat behind me. And that ended my lunch on the bus, because a few seconds after he'd sat his stench hit me. Wow — you'd have to soak your pants in pee and wear them wet to smell that strongly of human ammonia. Dude stank so profoundly of urine, instead of hungry I was ready to wretch. 

I closed my box of chicken, and saved the last two tenders for the microwave at home. Meanwhile, I pulled my COVID mask over my face again, which replaced the stink of a stranger's pee with the familiar, pleasant aroma of my own perpetually bad breath for the rest of my ride home.

And again at last, another little problem had been solved, life was OK, and one good thing usually leads to another. My ankle pain was already subsiding as I walked into the house, zapped the chicken for 45 seconds, and settled into my recliner.

1/7/2024   

 itsdougholland.com
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