So the old, terrible Cala Foods on the corner of California and Hyde died almost a year ago, and finally, after a year of incubating, a Trader Joe's was born yesterday. Since I'm unemployed and drink too much on weeknights, I decided to walk over in my pig pen haze of dust and stink-lines on opening day and see if this was really the second coming of grocery-Jesus.
Over the past year, the entire neighborhood and anyone within a decent hike has expressed anywhere from casual optimism to full on, your-name-just-got-called-on-"The Price Is Right"-ecstasy; and wherever you're thoughts and feelings fell on that spectrum, you were right to feel that way. The old Cala Foods was a terrible place to buy food and no matter what my day had entailed up to the point of entering Cala, I immediately felt like I had been doing dirty things in the TL for an unknowable amount of time and the only thing I was going to be leaving with was a frozen pizza, Coco Krispies or chili; because obviously real groceries were an impossibility at a time like this. Cala sucked.
But you know what, Trader Joe's is kinda overrated. After two whole walk-through's on what was considered the unofficial "soft opening", I wasn't able to find a single thing that was going to satisfy my hangover monster. That's a problem. Ok, so maybe I'm a bit indecisive when my brain is functioning at half-speed, and maybe I get a bit overwhelmed when experiencing shiny, new things; but I've been to Trader Joe's before and I'm pretty familiar with their brand of neu-hippie, quasi-ethnic, fancy-ish foodstuffs and I guess none of that really impresses me. Sure there are things that I like from Trader Joe's, but walking the floor on opening day once again reminded me how overrated Trader Joe's actually is.
I won't make the argument that Cala is even remotely comparable, because, come on, but it definitely made me realize that it's just a store, and sometimes you're hungover and you just want to eat a whole Tombstone to yourself and pretend like you didn't, or eat a box of Coco Krispies at 3am.
