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In Praise of Rainbow Foods
Filed under: Shopping
I don't mean to circle back to the running theme of moving house from Uptown to Longfellow, but it's hard to avoid. We eat local whether we like it or not, and restaurants and grocery stores are clear windows into what a given neighborhood is really "like."
Along those lines: There were three grocery stores (that I knew of/frequented) in Uptown. Lunds, which was typically frequented by white, well-to-do older people. Kowalski's, which was typically frequented by white, well-to-do younger people. And the ill-maintained Rainbow on Lake Street, which was frequented by... everybody else.
For various reasons, my wife and I eventually wound up doing most of our non farmer's market shopping at a large Cub Foods about four miles to west. This was not an ideal solution.
Now we're living in Longfellow, and I've discovered a completely different aspect to the clean, well-stocked Rainbow up on Lake Street and Minnehaha. It's frequented by... everyone. White, black, Asian, Middle Eastern — the struggling, the middle-class, the wealthy — old, young, middle-aged — name a category, and a representative is probably strolling the aisles somewhere.
I like it. Let me restate that. I love it. It reminds me of moving to Brooklyn, riding the subway, and realizing that everybody takes the subway to get everywhere. There are a lot of things to dislike about modern America, and one of the most annoying is that folks tend to separate from one another, centrifuging apart into places where we don't even need to look at someone from a different race and/or economic class, let alone do business with them.
Posted by James Norton at May 1, 2008 1:15 AM
« Is this the best cookie ever? | Main | Drink of the Week: The Silly Rabbit »
Comments
Hello, I am one of your co-shoppers. I also love the Rainbow on Lake. It may have some of the dirtiest, wiltiest produce I've ever seen. But I love the people who shop there and the foods they stock because of it.
One of my friends refers to this grocery store as "The United Nations". As in, "I was at The United Nations getting some milk the other day when..."
Posted by: Jack at May 1, 2008 8:27 PM
Yeah, the diversity is nice. But the lines are not.
I live in the Powderhorn Park neighborhood and used to shop at the Rainbow on Lake and Minnehaha until I couldn't stand it anymore. Even the lines at Trader Joe's on a busy Saturday afternoon are quicker.
Let me know if you still love Rainbow once you've waited through a 10-person deep express line, you're up next, and the lovely girl in front of you splits her 30-item purchase into three sales to be within the limits, then spends five minutes debating which items to remove from her last load of groceries because she already spent $5 of her food stamps on Doritos in the first load and doesn't have enough money left.
Not to mention, as Jack said, the produce is disgusting.
Posted by: Katie at May 1, 2008 10:35 PM
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