Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Family Friendly

One of our neighborhood grocery stores is now advertising its "family friendly" checkout aisle. In the family friendly aisle, all the naughty and filthy magazines are removed from sight of the young people. Now your child doesn't have to gaze on the pitifully bloated and increasingly desperate face of Britney Spears as you go through the checkout line. No more covers of Jessica Simpson to provide fuel to whatever early fantasy life your son may be developing. Your child will never have to learn that space aliens have already set the apocalypse in motion by raising Elvis from the dead.

Those geniuses at Kroger have made shopping so much easier for families by replacing all that rack space with, can you guess? Candy. Racks and racks and racks of candy. It's hard enough to get Fiona past the gum and the Tic Tacs without also having to steer her away from chocolate bars as high as the eye can see. On our first accidental trip through the "family friendly" aisle, enormous mountains of chocolate towered above her and the whining and pleading started the second I started unloading groceries.

I've got news for you Kroger. There are gallons more children's tears shed over chocolate than there are over magazine covers hawking celebrity gossip. I think that you should rename it the "Puritan Aisle" or the "Aisle for People Who Really Don't Want to Look at Angelina Jolie One More Minute" but calling it "family friendly" just makes me want to think very disdainful thoughts about you. And George Bush, because I'm sure somehow he must be behind this.