Whole Foods Union Square, NYC. To your left, just as you enter. The store has escalators. I believe there's a mechanism for getting a shopping cart from floor to floor. Wait, no. That was in the nearby Bed, Bath & Beyond. In this Whole Foods, there is a flow of shoppers that seems like a closed loop, so that no one actually enters or leaves; the same people circulate ceaselessly. They don't eat, drink, or sleep. They have no lives other than the one in the store. I found the few things I needed and carried them in one of those hard plastic baskets you loop over your arm. I'd been in there before with my sister so I knew they had a system for how to pay and I remembered it was daunting. I figured I could handle it. There are half a dozen or so aisles of registers with cashiers and there are lines where customers are supposed to queue up. The way you know it's your turn to step up to the register is via the electronic boards that blink the aisle number. There are curved arrows indicating which lanes apply to which numbers. Somehow this is supposed to translate into functionality. Twice I stepped forward and twice I was stopped by a customer behind or beside me chasing after me with great determination and telling me firmly and with just a bit more annoyance than I remember being able to generate when I was a full-time New Yorker that it was NOT MY TURN. The message was clear: I had done a terrible thing in a)not knowing that it was NOT MY TURN and b)expecting to pay anyway and c)breathing. I went back to the entrance and handed my basket to a nice guard posted at the door. I told him I'd changed my mind and didn't want to buy anything. I apologized for inconveniencing him. I handed him the basket. He seemed sad for me and a little perplexed. I went out empty-handed, which is how I came in.
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