Last week Baby was cold, so I thought I would serve up some hot cocoa. This thought came to me at the grocery. I thought I’d pick up some packets of Swiss Miss instant cocoa.
I know, I could make my own, but I wasn’t inclined to buy dry milk and sugar and cocoa and make my own mix and then have to store it. I didn’t know the difference between hot cocoa and hot chocolate at the time. (Here’s the difference: one is heated wet cocoa powder and one is a heated wet chocolate bar. YES, I know, it seems obvious now.)
So I went to the far reaches of the store to find the hot cocoa. Powdered drinks – no, just Koolaid. Coffee? No – just K-cups of hot cocoa. K-cups that will fit in my Nespresso machine? No.
“How do kids today make hot cocoa?” I wondered. “I know they don’t make it from scratch.”
I never worked out the answer. I called an audible and bought chocolate milk and heated it up in the microwave. Tasted hot and chocolate.
Of course, that left me with too much chocolate milk. I got the bright idea to put it through the cappuccino milk frother. It came out hot and foamy and utterly tasteless. Peculiar. I’ll have to start using it on my granola, instead.
That was last week. This is the east side of the same store this week:
And here is the west side:
I should have bought some hot cocoa when I saw the hot cocoa aisle and hot cocoa armoire, because evidently this is the week the hot cocoa Brigadoon is visible, and it will disappear next time I want to find it.
7 responses to “Hot Cocoa Limbo”
The “things grocery stores can’t agree on where to put” category hasn’t previously included hot cocoa in my experience (with all other hot drinks, sometimes also tang/koolaid is there, too), but it looks like this store goes for having an Mostly Children’s Products aisle? That is weird.
(strong candidates so far for a “baffle grocery store employees” list, of the “we know we have it, but where…?” type: Marshmallow cream, yeast, and dried apricots or dates.) (marshmallow cream has been found either with marshmallows, or with ice cream toppings [chocolate syrup, etc.], or in the kosher aisle; yeast has been found in the baking aisle near the flour or near the baking soda (this one, to me, makes the most sense), with the velveeta and other shelf-stable cheeses in an island between the meat section and the dairy section (???!!!) and in various apparently-random corners of refrigerated sections. Dried fruits are sometimes in the produce area (usually on shelves underneath the pyramids of fruits), sometimes in a snacking section either next to nuts or next to candy, sometimes in the baking aisle, sometimes in the International Foods section, sometimes in bulk bins or repackaged-bulk-items, and sometimes near either granola bars or fruit rollups.)
KC – There should be some type of Dewey Decimal standard system for grocery stores.
Something I found out recently: Dewey, while standard, is implemented by each library differently. The buckets are standardized and set in stone, yes, but *which bucket you put a specific book into* is a decision that individual librarians make. (!!!)
So you’d still get the “Should rolled oats go in 301.7 Baking Supplies [which we keep in Aisle 8b], or 128.64 Cereals [Aisle 6a], or 532.93 Health Foods [Aisle 6b]?” sort of questions.
(which makes me think of having a grocery store card catalogue, and that would be *awesome*)(unless it was horrific. Which it probably would be. Never mind. It *would* be nice if you could look up online where in a store a specific product was, like you can now do with big-box home improvement stores, though.)
KC – I recently found out the same thing myself. Was it on http://www.magpiemusing.com/2019/01/the-library-book.html ? Given how groceries deliberately move things around every few years to spur aisle-wandering purchases (I think I heard that when I worked in that area at Ralston Purina), I don’t think they would go for any system.
It was not, but hooray, another blog to look at! 🙂 (there is at least quite a reasonable chance that blogs that discuss the Dewey Decimal System would be within my interests…)
That’s right, the deliberate thwarting of customers’ sanity for profit reasons. (I am… not 100% a fan of many of our current forms of business profits/ethics. But I also don’t see a way out, given all factors.)
(Also, the example in that blog post is *exactly* why I feel that all proofreaders of books should use “track changes” or something similar so that authors can verify that each one is a good change rather than a misinterpretation or, as in this case, something that needs to be changed further to make sense. I can understand why publishers would resist this – authors, as human beings, can be petty and feudal and revert things just to revert them, sometimes – but oof, the things you can catch.)(Note: unless the proofreader is ultra-low-budget outsourced, I think almost all books will benefit more from a proofreader pass than they’ll suffer, even if the author can’t check over each revision. But the author checking over each revision will kill more errors – and at least has a *chance* of killing all errors introduced by the proofreader’s revision process.)
KC – thank you for noticing it was a child-centric aisle, by the way. No wonder I didn’t look at it.