Once Upon a ShopRite

If you want to people-watch without having to do much work, go grocery shopping in the middle of a Saturday afternoon. This is the time when anyone with a day job, from laborers to business professionals, get into their cars and drive to the local supermarket to “stock up” for the week. Spend five minutes in the store, and you’ll see shopping carts filled to the brim with everything from cereal, to spare ribs, to bottled water, and sometimes, if you’re lucky, you might even spot a shopping cart full of white bread.

That’s right: white bread.

This past Saturday, while I was standing in line behind a couple speaking Spanish, a woman holding a baby, a family of four pushing two overloaded shopping carts, and an old man holding a can of soup, I saw, in the line next to me, a couple behind a shopping cart completely filled with loaves of white bread. And not just plain white bread, but the day-old kind, marked with those bright orange ninety-nine-cent stickers. They must have had over thirty loaves of bread in that shopping cart.

Now, what could a person do with an entire cart full of day-old white bread?

• Make stuffing for the entire Salvation Army. Twice.
  
• Build a cheap gingerbread house . . . or an entire ginger-neighborhood.
  
• Insulate a dog house.
  
• Feed a lot of pigeons.
  
• Create a collection of stylish coasters.
  
• Leave a nice long breadcrumb trail from NYC to Boston, or DC, or maybe even all the way to Chicago!