Undaunted Joy #83 Guest Maya Sinha

The Joy of Grocery Outlet

Every once in a while, I like to feature a guest post. It is good to look at joy from a different view than just mine.

This week Undaunted Joy features writer,

Maya Sinha

. Maya and I met at last year’s Catholic Imagination Conference when we both discovered quite quickly that our names rhymed. Maya has turned into one of those writer friends to whom I can reach out to when writing seems lonely and just something I am doing at my desk day in and out. She is incredibly adept at moving through different genres. She shares the most incredible short stories on her Substack and then can write hilarious non-fiction like this piece. I hope you crack up as much as I did at this terrific essay. My family identified with this greatly!

***

Over the years, I’ve spent so much time grocery shopping that I am surely a 10,000-hour expert, a Yo-Yo Ma whose instrument is a rolling cart with one draggy wheel.

I’ve shopped them all: the hipster market, the Wal-Mart superstore, the generic chain, the quirky chain, the weird-smelling convenience store, and the mood-lit paradise with hot bar, patisserie, and coffee station.

These days, my favorite is the Grocery Outlet in my neighborhood, housed in a strip mall with a Dollar Store, a Goodwill, and a Laundromat. I walk there almost every day, and there is usually some sketchy character hanging around.

At first, I avoided Grocery Outlet. I was used to the patisserie crowd of laptop-class suburban moms. In contrast, many Grocery Outlet shoppers seemed to exist on the unseen margins: elderly apartment dwellers, non-English speakers, foreign students. These were not my people. They were just, you know, people.

One day I went in, just to look around.

I soon discovered that the store held more appeal than I thought. By 2023, I had forgotten what it was like to buy household staples without feeling ripped off. Last winter, the price of eggs was a national joke. In such a time, discount grocery shopping was the smart play. While my dumb ass was paying top dollar over at Fancy Mart, the grad students, octogenarians, and abuelitas at Grocery Outlet were snapping up dog food, hair conditioner, vitamins, and cheese at deep discounts.

It wasn’t just about the bottom line. Shopping at Grocery Outlet felt fun, even freeing, because per Forrest Gump, you never knew what you were gonna get. As I perused shelves of slightly “off” products—unsold inventory from other stores—I felt my preference for a certain brand of hair goo fall away. What did it matter? I didn’t need a particular kind of dish soap. If it was bright-orange and the label was in Spanish, that would work. Programmed since childhood to make consumer choices, to feel vital and alive when picking one product over a near-identical product, I found that I could simply accept what was there, go with the flow. Life would be fine, no matter what corn oil or toothpaste we used that week.

Cruising the aisles in the spirit of adventure, I found myself tossing strange new things in the cart. An Italian nut-and-fig spread, duck-flavored dog biscuits, a frozen tray of broccoli and cheese, a Keto-friendly nut butter called “Fatso.” For two bucks, why not see whether I liked sardines in Louisiana hot sauce? Like Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree, most of these hard-to-sell foods turned out to be pleasant surprises, though I can’t speak for the dog.

Best of all, there were no kiosks, and the human cashiers were cheerful and friendly. Some days it felt like everyone in the store was engaged in some delightfully subversive endeavor.  

“Thrift is poetic because it is creative,” G. K. Chesterton observed.

Grocery shopping isn’t poetic. And yet, sometimes, it is.

****

Maya Sinha is an essayist and former humor columnist for The Saturday Evening Post. Her first novel, The City Mother, won a 2023 Catholic Media Award for fiction. For more of her work, visit her Substack blog Creative License and mayasinhawriter.com. 

If you would like to write a guest post, send me your submission through a joyful lens in less than 500 words! Perhaps we can find a home for it! With over 1200 subscribers, I’d love to use this Substack to share other joyful voices.

This post includes affiliate links