J-Rab and I have been meaning to take our grocery shopping experience to a whole other level by hitting up the Fruit and Veg City near Gardens.
We were in the market for some fresh, affordable produce because fruit and vegetables are an important ally in the fight against scurvy (we learned that the hard way).
So we set off on Saturday, already silently congratulating ourselves for being so progressive in our choice of fruit and vegetable vendor only to encounter a distinctly average shopping experience.
Walking in, one of the Fruit and Veg trolley jockeys drove a trolley square into my Achilles tendon, which is to be expected in a store that looks like someone with one eye laid it out.
We spent the next twenty minutes painstakingly navigating our way through cramped, badly laid out isles only to queue for a till that didn’t have a card facility, forcing me to stand at another isle to pay for my groceries.
In retrospect that’s probably the moment when an opportunistic fellow shopper / Fruit and Veg employee decided to make off with our tinned tomatoes which mysteriously disappeared between putting them in our basket and driving back home.
To add insult to injury the lettuce pillow cases, which any vegetarian will tell you are the cornerstone of healthy living, looked sad and soggy and the free range chicken legs we bought decided to expire spectacularly after we bought them, exactly one day before the sell by date.
To be honest, I felt more than a little relieved when we discovered that the rancid smell in the kitchen was the chicken and not the imaginary farts J-Rab kept accusing me of making.
AND (last one I promise) the loaf of rye bread we bought on Saturday had started growing mould by Monday, which is probably the worst day to have to deal with mouldy anything.
We were drawn to Fruit and Veg City by the promise of quality fruit and vegetables at bargain prices and were greeted instead with pretty much the same prices you pay anywhere and ropey food.
Sure, not ALL the food was ropey, you can lower your pitchforks. It was really just the salad we saw, the mouldy rye bread we bought and the chicken that turned on us faster than a rabid housepet. The fruit we bought was top-quality, but it’s not really that much cheaper than Pick ‘n Pay.
Did I just go on a bad day? Any of you guys shop there regularly? Should we bother going back?
-ST