It was a pilgrimage. The objective was to experience booze in an Ontario grocery store. There was no such grocery store in Barrie. Our city is too unimportant to the Ontario government to have beer in grocery stores. Last weekend we stayed in Toronto and early Sunday morning set out to see beer in a grocery store. Only the beer was disappointing.
We loved the store. We went to the huge Loblaws down by the Lakeshore in Toronto’s East end. It covers most of a city block. Where we went in there was a sign as big as the store name that said: BEER HERE. We were eager to see this.
Where we went in was a sushi bar that would be large by Tokyo standards. There was a delicatessen of great dimension. There was a restaurant for immediate gratification. There was a bakery that specialized in wonderful breads. The wife kept trying to pick up exotic fruits and vegetables as we made our way into the depths of the store.
But we both succumbed in the acres of meats. Thick barbeque-ready strip loins were on sale and we could not resist.
What surprised us was a display behind glass of large slabs of beef going through the aging process. It started with the red and marbled beef that most North American housewives want to buy and went through four stages of aging to the dark and less appealing appearance of properly aged beef–and with flavour you cut with a fork.
By the time we got to the grocery area, the long lines of shelving looked like a lengthy journey. Looking up and down the many aisles, beer was not in evidence. We finally traversed the dairy aisle that was a city block long. We saw brand names we had never seen in Barrie. We saw prices we hope we do not see in Barrie.
But we finally found beer. It was by accident. It was a couple minutes after 11 am and a store employee was moving large black screens away from two end-aisles. The screens said that beer could not be sold before 11 am on Sundays. It also says a great deal about the ignorance of the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO) that makes the rules for how you sell beer.
One end-aisle had several craft beers and the other end-aisle had some popular Ontario brews available. It was a miserable display. They were not even refrigerated. If we really wanted beer, we would have gone to Ontario’s disgusting Beer Store. We would not have had to walk as far.
And do not get us going about the restrictions on the grocery/beer checkouts.
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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry
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