I have been an Amazon prime customer since the time I came to US and have used online shopping for lot of stuff over the years including grocery at times. However the suburbia I live in is practically built for in store shopping for regular stuff you need. Of course there is no personal local grocer and it is all chain stores but again after a while there is some sort of familiarity and rhythms to your usual life. Also supermarket grocery stores are quintessential American staple. These trips to supermarkets or dairy stores or hardware stores or Indian grocery stores become part of your regular weekend routine. The stores are pretty big in most places with sufficient space for you to shop and parking is always a breeze where I live as space is always in abundance so there is no hardship in going to shop in person and time is always never in short supply this point of my life with little one who has not reached a stage where she is pushed into lot of activities / studies and what not and when she really cares about going out on trips in car with dad even if its to buy some veggies or to pick up milk cartons from a store.
Since the arrival of pandemic and general panic associated with it, we made a decision to avoid doing any in person shopping sometime in middle of March. The self imposed rule got relaxed occasionally after June when everyone realized this is not going away soon. I started making trips to buy things that we really needed, but it was just me initially and then after a point my wife also started stepping outside home for occasional shopping trips. However we didn't let our daughter go for any such shopping expedition and for most part that's what most parents who could help it did. But with all such self enforced isolations and precautionary measures fatigue sets in and I could see over a period of time the number of folks coming to stores and folks bringing their kids along as well started going up. One day when we drove up in car and then just one of us went in to pick up stuff we had pre-ordered online and came back my daughter was very disappointed that she could not go inside the store. As usual I tried to explain that there is corona virus so we have to be careful and then she pointed at some other kids going in with parents and asked if it doesn't apply for those folks.
By the time last week of September came, we sort of realized we are going to live this way for another year so might as adjust accordingly. I finally decided its been a while and took my daughter with me for a shopping trip to buy some Milk from a dairy/ice cream store. We picked morning 9 AM to ensure is not much crowd inside the store (there was just one other customer) which sells ice-creams and sundaes and stuff on one side and has milk and limited collection of fruits, veggies, bread, frozen food in another section. I had coached the little one enough times about not touching anything and ensuring facemask is in proper position and not fiddling with it. In a well practiced move we swooped into the store scanned around and saw there was no human being in sight in the Milk and veggies aisles and moved purposefully and picked up a few cartons of milk. As well walked towards the checkout counter, my daughter saw some 'goldfish crackers' and asked for it and got it. That perhaps was the first impulse buy in a long long time in a world of well planned online shopping or online order and store pickup shopping to just browse casually and pick up something that strikes your fancy at the moment with no real desire until that point, that particular purchase and the shopping trip for a minute made me feel like things were normal again.
