Champion Family Foods: The Saddest Supermarket in Canada?

Let me begin by saying there is nothing objectively wrong with Champion Family Foods; it sells all the usual goods you would expect at a supermarket, for competitive prices, and the staff are about as helpful as one can reasonably expect in Edmonton. I don't think Champion Family Foods is a dangerous or unsanitary location to purchase your average comestibles. However, CFF (11720 Jasper Avenue) has somehow managed to make a deep emotional connection with me, a connection that affects me every time I go in to find something for dinner. This is not a positive emotional connection.

It might be sadness. It could be pity. It's likely both. But something about that store makes me too morose to eat. I could go in there after a marathon, fiending for red meat and cookie dough ice cream, stomach imploding with hunger pangs, irrational with nutritional desperation, but as soon as I see that green-tinted flickering fluorescent light oozing down from the ceiling, my appetite pulls up its socks and takes off for the day. Then I'm stuck: logically, I know that I should eat, but I can't ignore the pathos. Food that I know to be both edible and delicious looks as though it is being sold at the bottom of a lake, which makes me feel even worse, because in a real lake, at least the fish would have eaten this food; here, no one wants it. So I start to look for something appetizing enough to overcome the beige-ish floor tiles and eighties-era shelving units. But everything looks green. And I start to feel sad.

I feel bad for these guys because I know they can't compete with the chain stores - most supermarkets offer specialty services and bright, clean, even deceptive product displays meant to trick you into buying more. Even the Mac's across the street has more to offer in terms of presentation. The independent grocery store is a dinosaur galloping toward extinction. Even the good ones have little to no chance of long-term survival. Champion Family Foods looks to be a stegosaurus on its last leg.

And as I walk around CFF I see that they have removed nearly all of their cash registers; where financial hope had once been there is now a white plastic picnic table and chair from the "lounge area," asking me to stay awhile.

But I'm hungry. So I leave without buying anything. And I feel bad about myself as I walk eight blocks east.