After dining I decided it would be a good idea to lay in some supplies. I mosied down the strip, peering in here and there at the various offerings of the merchants.
I came to a store called Marc's that looked promising. I entered and soon found myself in a befuddling array of aisles filled with eye aching phalanxes of brightly colored packaging, fresh fruit, and dead animals processed into what I presumed were edible delicacies. Other aisles held bottles of chemicals for a thousand uses, voodoo medicines, implements for cleaning or, perhaps, torture(or maybe both), baby care products, and all manner of trinkets and wampum. Cases were stacked with cans and bottles of the industrialized sewer water that passes for beverages here.
Signs extolling the cheapness of various brands were plastered everywhere.
I browsed the dead meat aisle. It was filled with ground animals mixed with spices and formed into rolls of variuous sorts. Sometimes three or four packages named the same item from different companies.
Now why, I wondered, would they need to have many firms make the same thing? Smoked sausage was smoked sausage, right?
Curious, I put several brands of the same type of meat in my card. Did this for 3-4 different meats.
Ground, baked grains. Bread.
This was, I think, even worse. Must have been 8 different brands of bread plus an assortment of rolls, buns, and sweets. I controlled myself here and picked up a single loaf.
Frozen foods
Bags and packs of various processed items. I decided at first to pass, then noted what appeared to be a confection called ice cream. I hadn't tried any of the sweets here yet and decided to take a plunge. Ths apes seemed to like colorful so I picked out a green ice cream with black bits spread throughout. Mint chocolate chip the box read.
Prepackaged foods.
I read a few boxes and cans. I noted the vast array of chemcial additives, most of which were multisyllabic gibberish that hadn't been in our English studies. I wondered if the native apes eating this stuff had any better idea what they were. I grabbed some boxes of spahgetti, some spghetti suace, which I had cleverly surmised went with the spaghetti, some beef stew, canned veggies and prepared to leave.
A year here, I feared, might require 6 months of detox back home.
At the checkout there were 3-4 people in each line I picked one and after about 10 minutes got to the register. A dark skinned she ape examined each package I had and entered the price manually on an onerous and complicated looking contraption dotted with rows of cryptic looking buttons.
"$52.43," she requested blandly.
In order to function in this society our techie people had hacked into the banking systems and set up funded accounts and credit cards for those of us conducting humanity's evaluation. I had paid my rent by check. I had used my credit card without incident at Abba's earlier. Having field tested it on that smaller purchase, I whipped it out confidently again.
"I'm sorry, sir," she said, " to keep our costs low we only take cash."

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