After working at Safeway all through high school and college grocery stores have become somewhat of a second home to me. Helping customers pick out ripe produce, showing off my stacking skills, and helping check people out was the name of the game for the last five years for me. I have found that I need to hold myself back from comparing produce departments of other stores to ours and helping out the checker remember the produce codes. Tomatoes on the Vine.. 4664.. Broccoli… 3082… Bananas… 4011… Limes… 4040… and I could go on for an hour or so of just codes. Yikes, did I really just admit to that? Even after all of the Safeways I’ve worked at and the countless amount of times I complained about working there I do miss it sometimes. I worked with some of the coolest people at my Enumclaw, Springfield, and Portland stores and a lot of which are still some of my best friends. It is probably the social aspect of the job and the people that I miss the most, but regardless grocery stores tend to give me warm fuzzy feelings of comfort. Not sure I want to admit that either, but I’m going to roll with it.

Since I moved to the city I’ve had to completely learn a set of different chain grocery stores in the city. None of which I had heard prior to moving here- D’agostinos, Gristedes, and Food Emporium are the ones that I see on a regular basis. Yesterday we ended up stopping at an out of the ordinary store that I thought was pretty cool and worth a blog post. The location? Food Emporium which as I said is pretty typical, but not this location! It was built underneath the Queensboro Bridge and when I say built under the bridge I mean the bottom of the bridge is the store’s roof. It was so cool and all of the bridges columns went throughout the store. I mean I have seen a lot of grocery stores, but this one definitely takes the gold for the coolness award. The Grand Central of grocery stores might I dare propose? I have to say too that their produce department was pretty impressive too, which is something I don’t throw around lightly. They even had me stumped on a product I haven’t seen before, and when it comes to produce I know the ropes pretty darn well. Never in my life have I seen Brussel sprouts growing on a kind of vine or branch though.

Needless to say, I was pretty impressed with the store and the new produce discovery. Check out my photos above and check out this store for yourself!

Until next time, good night!