Suburbanista: Food Fight in the Wegmans Parking Lot

Photograph by Clint Blowers

At 3 p.m, on Saturday, the day before Winter Storm Titan was due to bury the entire Delaware Valley in a foot of snow, my friend Mandy did the stupidest thing any human being could ever do, ever.

She went to the Cherry Hill Wegmans.

I have long held the belief that the Cherry Hill Wegmans is the meanest place on earth. It’s not the people who work there. They’re quite lovely. Not only do they give you samples of brie with fig preserves on a freshly toasted baguette; they smile while doing it. No matter how many times management forces them to reorganize the store, they always, always know where to find canned whole clams. And if they make the error of doing their own shopping while still wearing their Wegmans employee golf shirts and you mistakenly ask them for help, they won’t hesitate to abandon their carts to go to the storeroom and find tahini for you. They are saints. And they have to be. Because the people who shop at Wegmans are evil.

Case in point: At 3:22 p.m. on said Saturday afternoon, I received this text from Mandy:

I am in Wegmans and a woman is SCREAMING at a man in the cheese section!

Mandy and I often share stories about the wickedness we witness at Wegmans. It started one Sunday a few years ago when we randomly bumped into each other there, near diapers and wipes, both unshowered and proud of it, moments before my wallet was stolen out of my purse in bulk food. (My own Wegmania may have been partly to blame for that. I’m not exactly myself there. Just a few weeks ago, Mandy happened upon me in the Asian food section, dazed and confused, mumbling to myself about low-sodium soy.)

And then there was that time during a school holiday when our friend Kris had no choice but to bring her four kids to the store. Her middle son accidentally nudged a woman’s cart into the kale, and the lady whipped her head around and shouted, “Those children do not belong here!” (Calmly, Kris replied, “Well, how about this: Next time I need to go food shopping, I’ll just drop them all at your house, ’kay?”)

And then there was that other time when my friend Maya bent down to snag some instant oatmeal off the bottom shelf in the gluten-free wing and was run over by another cart, then left there on the floor, prone and flailing, while the driver sprinted around a corner, executing a textbook Wegmans hit-and-run. And, of course, the time a woman F-bombed a man waiting at the prepared-foods counter because she thought he’d cut her in line and the man’s wife practically had to cover his mouth to prevent him from F-bombing the lady right back, all of this going down on Christmas Eve, the time of year when all our troubles are supposed to be miles away.

Apparently, those troubles reside permanently at the intersection of Route 70 and Haddonfield Road. At first I assumed that people who live in Cherry Hill and its environs were especially vile humans. But I run into the same clientele at other stores in the Wegmans shopping plaza, and I’ve never heard anyone in, say, Home Depot, shout, “Get the fuck out of my way, bitch!”

I’m pretty sure this new villainy comes hand-in-hand with the recent dawning of the Age of the Fancy Market. People who shop at Acme? Civil. People at ShopRite? Giddy. But go to Whole Foods, and someone wearing a NAMASTE t-shirt will smash her cart into your heels until they bleed to beat you to that extra-firm tofu on sale for $16.99 an ounce.

Still, Wegmans is worse. It’s where the twain meet — where you can buy the cheapest milk in town and organic medjool dates. Like the Shore, everyone is here, except they’re hungry. And they use their carts as weapons.