Lost amid plenty.

My favorite supermarket is completely rejiggering itself. Walls painted, floors replaced, and most of all, departments moved around willy-nilly. Meanwhile, it's open for your shopping pleasure! 

Pleasure is not the word. This kind of thing brings out my inner Rain Man. 

Here's a simplified -- well, maybe stupified -- map of the store layout to which I have grown accustomed over more than a decade. 

When the weekly list is set, I rewrite it in the order of the aisles as I will encounter them. I might say I could shop it in my sleep. I couldn't quite shop it blindfolded, because a can of corn feels much like a can of peas. But if I did shop it blindfolded, I would probably bring home stuff we would use. I wouldn't be groping blindly for canned tomatoes in the cleaning goods aisle.

But that was before. I can't quite figure out what the final plan is supposed to be now. Something like this:

It doesn't make any sense. Worst of all, things were in the process of being moved while I was shopping, so some products wound up in multiple aisles while others were nowhere to be found. 

I appreciate that they want to update the look of the place and make it fresh and clean, but I wish they'd taken the hit and closed entirely until it was done. But there were probably good reasons beyond just money lost that they chose not to do that. 

I will have to avoid them for a couple more weeks until I'm sure it's all over. Maybe a month. They're certainly doing this now to get ready for the big Halloween / Thanksgiving / Christmas / New Year blob that brings in the big dough, and they'll surely be done with the reno by the middle of October.

At least that is my hope. I hate when I have to curl up on the floor in Frozen Foods out of sheer anxiety. The managers aren't keen on it either.

For a worry-free experience.

The other day I was, uh, straightening up in a restroom when I noticed that there was writing on the stall lock. I always read writing wherever it may be, in the hope of finding bad spelling or grammar. It did not happen in this case, but I did see this:

"Scranton Products: Designed to Be Worry-Free"

At first I thought that was rather silly. The latch on a toilet stall hardly seems to be the thing that keeps people awake at night. "Oh, God, what if the locks that we put on the toilet fail? What if some clever thief defeats our toilet security? We'll be ruined!"

But the more I thought about it, the more I started to worry. Probably everyone has had the humiliating experience of using a can they thought was locked, only to find out in a catastrophic manner---perhaps involving a vindictive sibling or classmate---that it was not. Now I'm starting to worry.

Scranton Products uses this slogan for all the things it provides, like lockers and vanities. If their lockers had been in the New York public schools of my youth, and had indeed been worry-free, they would have been eligible for a Nobel Prize of some sort. We had no lockers. They would not have stayed locked. They'd have just been -ers. We had gym lockers, but only a fool left anything there overnight. In fact, most of us had the experience of having our lockers broken into during gym, which takes some doing. The thugs in my schools were nothing if not dedicated.

So I don't think Scranton could have achieved worryless status in my schools, but in the office or other workplace, I think they can. Their Hiny Hiders (really!) line of bathroom stalls (and locks) seems quite well-made and certain to inspire confidence.

I salute you, Scranton Products, and your fine toilet stalls. Now, if you could come up with some means to force guys to wash their hands after using the Hiny Hiders, we would all feel even less worried.