I give all you city people permission to laugh at me. But I was completely gobsmacked during a recent shopping excursion to WalMart (of all places). We were in the Albany area and had to grab some stuff. Walking in, we commented to each other that we hadn’t ever been in a two-story WalMart before. Then we casually went on filling up our cart with food.

After we were nice and stocked, we stared at each other in an awkward “Hey, well, we obviously weren’t thinking” moment. The rest of the items we needed were upstairs. What was the best option?

• A) Both check out together, walk to the car, unload the food and come back for the rest? It was a warmish day so we weren’t sure if we wanted the dairy products to sit in a hot car so long.
• B) Split up and have one take care of the food while the other grabbed the up-stair items? Not ideal since we wanted to discuss purchasing choices.

We edged the cart forward, leaning toward Choice A and deciding to just shop fast then we noticed people were actually taking carts up the escalator!!! There was a mechanism you pushed the cart onto, and it rode up right next to you (actually, it kind of beat us to the top).

Now that I am experienced in the cart escalator endeavors, I think in the future I will opt to hold my seltzer since it had a bit of a bumpy ride, but otherwise the process was extremely smooth — even on the way down with a card table and chairs overflowing the cart.

The experience reminded me of when we country folk used to travel to visit my parents on Long Island (where I grew up). I would take my sons to the mall where we would budget at least ten minutes per visit for the kids to ride the escalators. We had to remind them to not whoop and holler on the way up and down. Now I can relate to how hard it was for them to keep quiet when it’s all so much fun 🙂