Shopping is confusioning today
Published 11:52 pm Monday, October 19, 2026
It used to be a simple thing to go to the grocery store and buy what you needed, but today it is not only confusing, it is also quite time consuming. I took the list my wife gave last Saturday and made my way to Walmart, and as anyone who has shopped there over the last several months knows, there are changes encountered in the store that seem to happen on a daily basis making shopping more like a treasure hunt than shopping.
I shop for the groceries to free my wife to do the clothes and accessory shopping she enjoys so much, and also to speed up the shopping process, also so I don’t have to just stand and wait, or give my opinion on each clothing item she buys. Until I retired, shopping for me was mostly limited to things like tools or other non-consumable items. That was a simpler time! While the constant moving of items can be confusing and does add to the time I must spend in the store, something I also find confusing is the duplication of products.
I do not understand why, if the product inside one box of Corn Flakes is the same from one company to the next, why do we need a whole shelf of different brands? It also doesn’t help that advertisers try to convince us that one brand tastes better and is better for your health than any other brand and therefore you should pay more for them. I know many of us can not taste a difference in the products, but enough people believe their educated palates can that the green bean shelves must be filled with what must be every different brand of green bean that can be stuffed into cans. It is the same with most of the things we buy today, but I believe most people will agree with me that the only real difference in most of the products is the label.
The champion of confusion in shopping however, even more confusing than groceries or the constant movement of products; is medicine. The people who market medicine make an art form out of giving pills, and other medicines different names for their brand even when they do the same thing a generic brand does. I long for the days when simple aspirin and Castor Oil could cure most ailments.
Saturday I stood in front of a row of shelves filled with a myriad of little boxes and bottles of pills looking for a plain bottle of aspirin that my wife had on the list. I knew what the little box of generic aspirin looked like because I had bought one many times, but like everything else in Walmart it had been moved. All I could see were row after row of colorful boxes holding Tylenol, Arthritis medicine and so many other pain products that I began to feel dizzy just searching through the various names.
A woman stood beside me and she wore the same confused look on her face that must have been on mine because she smiled at me and shook her head knowingly. It turned out we were both looking for the same small bottle of aspirin so we searched for the elusive medicine together.
The little bottle was finally found near the bottom row of shelves causing old people like myself and the woman to bend over farther than we would like. Bending by the way is one of the reasons I must use aspirin.
I know Walmart is a great place to shop, and they do offer a lot of things the small neighborhood stores of my youth did , but when I went to Mr. Reed’s grocery store as a boy I had no problem finding where things were, because he did not move them around. I do like Walmart and you will find me shopping there often, and I know I will eventually learn the locations of the things I want to buy, but I also know that that is when they will move them again.
Jack Miller is a longtime Sedalia resident and former radio news reporter.
