Other Avenues

Every sport Vida plays brings us to a different neighborhood—this winter it’s Futsal in the Outer Sunset. Her Saturday practices are at St. Paul’s Church at 43^rd and Judah. For years and years I had been hearing about Other Avenues Natural Food Store. Usually it’s a customer who wants some weird natural food product that we don’t carry—likely to be raw, include carob in its ingredients or have been discontinued fifteen years ago. They try to make us feel lame that we don’t have it. It’s a worker owned Co-op as well—a fact that a certain stripe of customer will hold against us. While looking for parking I realized we were within spitting distance of Other Avenues.

I was surprised to see that along with the supplements, housewares, candles and other assorted non-food items dominated almost half the store. In my experience that kind of stuff is fun to order but doesn’t sell that well. Even Rainbow has gradually reduced their inventory of such things in favor what a health food does best—sell food. The produce was slightly better than I expected it to be—and my first clue that they don’t check prices very well was the display of Clementines being sold at the same price as the Satsumas—easier at the register but a definite money loser. I picked up a big bag of both. They had every oddball bakery in the city respresented on their shelves along with all the worst selling items of popular brands. I should have started to check dates just for fun but Victor was looking like he was about to try a game of hide and seek. I asked Victor what he wanted and he quickly chose Pirates Booty—I bought a couple of rolls in case Vida was hungry later. The beer selection was great but I didn’t feel like paying big bucks so I picked up a Pilsner Urquell in a can. When I saw these fancy chocolates we sell at our store for a ridiculously low price I started to understand how excited people would be to shop there for price—customers don’t really care if you make any money and I guess neither do the overly pierced Co-op workers.

They have the same old registers as we do but they have a rudimentary scanner as well. Hard to imagine that Other Avenues is just that much more technically advanced than we are despite our corporate ownership. I guess you shouldn’t fix what isn’t broke—at least not broken at the moment.

Victor and I then took our snacks over to the “boat park” which Vic fondly remembers from his daycare days with M. We played in the boat and pretended that one of the structures was a bulldozer. When we couldn’t take the cold any more we went back to the car for a nap.

Vic’s snack—Pirates Booty—My snack—tangerines--Beer of the Day—Pilsner Urquell in a can.