Free Range Hugs make my day

Tonight we were back in Mt. Washington at Whole Foods (a natural food store) where the following conversation took place:

Neil and I are walking down an aisle past two clerks stocking and facing shelves.¹

Me: I always thought grocery store shelves should be built like shelves in a research library, where they can be unlocked and rolled around, so that at night you could push them together and restock from the back.  It would be way easier to reach the back of the shelf and rotate the stock to keep older products at the front and put new ones at the back.

Female Clerk: Me, too! That’s a great idea!

Me: I worked in a health food store years ago, and I used to restock, too, so I had lots of time to think about it.

F.C.: It takes so much time! And it’s so boring!

Me: If it makes you feel any better, ever since then, when I buy groceries, I always face the shelf as I go, and replace the products I’ve put in my basket.

F.C.: Me, too! Oh, can I give you a hug?

Me (used to hugs from total strangers): Sure!

(F.C. hugs me. Silent Male Clerk looks on amused. Neil, also used to me getting hugs from strangers, is completely unperturbed.)

F.C.: Oh, thank you! It is so nice to talk to someone who UNDERSTANDS!

Me: You know, I face my pantry at home when I take something off the shelf, too.

F.C.: Me, too! Me, too!

We then proceeded to bond over the horrors of restocking the freezer case, and of getting locked in the freezer case, with Neil winning the prize by contributing a story about walking in from the rain and getting frozen to the floor of a freezer case.

Getting hugs from total strangers is a genetic propensity I seem to have inherited from my mother.  These sorts of things happen all the time to me. And they make my day!

It was an unexpected treat to get a hug from Whole Foods Girl today.  Thanks, Whole Foods Girl, and happy stocking!

I’m emailing this post to my friends back at Nature’s Fare in Kelowna where I used to work, so I have to ask: how many people here with retail food experience face the shelves while you shop? How many face your pantry at home? And how many of you hug your customers?

Don’t tell me Whole Foods Girl and I are the only ones! Fess up!

Photo credit: “sometimes, a hug is all what we need” by Flickr user kalandrakas, as part of the Free Hugs Campaign

1. The retail grocery term “facing” means to pull products to the front of the shelf. It probably comes from the library practice of aligning book spines evenly on the front edge of a book shelf, which goes by the same name. [↩]