Grocery shopping

Today I went shopping for Groceries at both Costco and Kroger.

I go to Costco about once a month to stock up on non-perishables that I consume on a regular basis, and I go to Kroger about once a week to buy perishables and other stuff I run out of regularly.

I don't know if anyone who reads this has ever been to Costco, but if you haven't, let me try to describe it. For an annual fee, you can enter a shopping warehouse the size of four football fields, filled with every product imaginable, from fresh fruit to batteries to soda pop to lawn fertilizer to frozen dinners, and everything there is in between. EVERYTHING is sold in bulk. You cannot buy anything in small quantities. The store also has a full pharmacy, a photo lab, an optometrist, a tire store, and a cell-phone retailer inside.

The biggest danger that comes from shopping there is that you might buy too much. I often do, but I have never failed to use everything I bought there. It may take a few years, but it gets used.

Kroger, by the way, is no slouch. You can buy nearly everything there as well, but you can usually get it in much smaller quantities, which is why I buy my perishables there.

You may be asking what my point is in all this. Well, Sparky, my point is this: We live in a nation of abundance. At any given hour, on any given day, in just about any place in this country, we can go to any grocery store or retail store and buy anything we need or want.

It was not always thus. In fact, this situation has only come to be within my lifetime. When my parents were born, they had no opportunity to do this. If they needed or wanted something that wasn't available, they simply did without.

I have to wonder how long our current situation will last. We as a species are facing a rapid depletion of our natural resources, a depletion that is destined to occur far faster than our current ability to replace them.

Hopefully, someone soon will be able to find a solution to this problem.

If they can't then God help us all.