Innocently disguised as a place at which to buy provisions, the grocery store is actually a scam waiting to happen -- and I'm not talking about paying too much for produce here. Take, for example, a certain San Francisco chain grocery store, which is nestled in a young-ish, wealthy-ish neighborhood. I once happened upon the store because I was driving by and its presence reminded me that I needed to go shopping (although many things seem to remind me to go shopping -- funny how that is). And that is how I innocently stumbled upon a mecca of designer-spandex-clad supermodels-in-waiting and twentysomething investment bankers, all reaching for the same produce.

True to form, I was dressed like a complete scrub -- I was running errands, for God's sake1x But so were these people, and they all looked as though they had stepped out of the pages of InStyle magazine. Or People, at the very least.

Could it be, I wondered? Have we come to the point in our dating rituals where we are judged by what is stocked in our cupboards? I mean, there seemed to be a sort of Darwinistic atmosphere of natural selection at work here -- as though people were not only trying to pick each other up, but were also trying to gauge their potential partner's nutritional value and mating prospects.

The most disturbing thing about the experience was that it seemed to be an accepted social norm. I had never seen a grocery store with so many attractive people, and so at first I figured that this was just a result of the neighborhood's demographic. Then it occurred to me that perhaps the beautiful people (or those willing to get dressed up in attempts to be so) came here because of its "social atmosphere" and not the other way around. It was as though this particular grocery store was the proverbial lightbulb to the beautiful people's moths, and the real reason that I had previously enjoyed grocery shopping in the relative comfort of scrubbiness was just that I had been shopping at the wrong grocery store.

By the time I made it to the checkout stand, I was spent. All this thinking about dating in the twentieth century, and the role that the grocery store would play . . .it had me exhausted. In addition, I had, without a doubt, the fullest cart in the store, stocked with lots of diet soda, as well as fresh fruit. As though it really mattered -- after all, I hadn't even met the dress code anyway.