Various impediments to purchasing a pizza

There's a little place up the block called Scent of Italy that had the best pizza I've yet encountered in Jersey City. Don't know how Authentic or whatnot it was, but it was perfect for my purposes -- thin, firm (but not overly crispy) dough with fluffy, chewy crust, a nice wet brush of sauce over that, a thin but substantial layer of mozzerella on top, and some thin-sliced mushrooms and other vegetables spread all over, along with thick pieces of sausage and pepperoni, all of it sunk into (and at points submerged in) the cheese, which was cooked to a minimum of browning.

Anyway, it was a minimum ten buck order for delivery, which put a 10" Supreme Pizza (as described above) just out of reach at $9.95 (next up was a 16" for $16.95, at which point you may just as well go for the $18.95 18"). The point being that, when ordering for myself, I was stuck calling in the order and then walking four blocks to pick it up. Which isn't a big deal in the more temperate seasons, but it's a full-on endurance test during the freezing months of winter. Which is why I pretty much flipped out on the counter-manning adolescent who fucked up my order one night last March.

Now keep in mind that Scent of Italy is famous (amongst, at the very least, myself and my roommate Chris) for employing quasi-pubescent girls whose innate stupidity had doomed them to a life of dire prospects long before their first inevitable unplanned pregnancy. Along the lines of:

ME: "I'd like to order a ten-inch Supreme Pizza for pickup"
IDIOT ADOLESCENT: "What?"
ME: "A ten-inch Supreme Pizza for pickup."
IDIOT ADOLESCENT: "Hold on a minute."
(An interval of some five minutes follows, often terminated by me hanging up the phone and calling back).
IDIOT ADOLESCENT: "What was your order?"
ME: [See above, but slower and with almost comical ennunciation]
IDIOT ADOLESCENT: "An eighteen-inch pepperoni pizza?"
ME: [See again above, but with an undertone of irritation that Adolescent is either oblivious to or blatantly uninterested in acknowledging]
IDIOT ADOLESCENT: "Fifteen minutes." (hangs up phone)

-- only imagine this going on way longer and without the endless, Escher-esque layers of repetition being edited out for the convenience of the blog-reading public.

The point being that the aggressively freezing March evening on which I trudged down those long cold blocks to pick up the 10" of sustenance-sustaing Supreme Pizza that would fill my stomach -- if not my Seasonal Affective Disorder-ravaged soul -- was far from the first on which I arrived to instead find an 18" Cheese Pizza ready for pickup. And was then offered the option of a) paying $15.95 (Cheese being cheaper than Supreme) for the pizza I hadn't ordered or b) waiting twenty minutes for the pizza I had ordered to be prepared. Which really shouldn't have been all that big a deal (the waiting shouldn't have been), except that I tend to wait until I'm already well past starving (and thus in a foul mood indeed) before ordering and am known to experience a Staring Into The Face Of The Abyss-grade discomfort with waiting for most anything.

So I pretty much flipped on the chick, or at least made enough of a scene that my Baptist humility-is-a-virtue-above-all-others genetic instincts kicked in pretty much the moment I walked out of the store, and I've been too ashamed/embarrassed to set foot in there ever since. (Scent of Italy has since either changed ownership or changed names, though the former is much more likely, and it's a shame because -- although I no longer patronize the place and their failure would have been hard-won, as detailed above -- their pizza really did rock). The upshot being that I was then forced to find a new solution to fulfilling my not-infrequent pizza cravings.
And keep in mind that I'm a lazy man, one who is not likely to take the chance on sampling some of the other pizzerias within an 8-10 block radius and running the risk of discovering that the product is substandard and then experiencing a level of disappointment/lack of fulfilment that is out of all porportion for what is, after all, nothing but a meal. So what I settled on was the famed "it's not delivery, it's DiGiorno" Personal-sized pizza, which really isn't at all like the longed-for Scent of Italy pizza -- being much thicker in dough and toppings alike -- but is at least a known quantity and if nothing else under my own control and immune from the cruel indiffernce of adolescent cashiers/phone operators.

But this poses its own problem: The ShopRite across the street (1) doesn't seem to have a dedicated rack in the Frozen Foods section for the DiGiorno Personal Pizza. There's a nice selection of full-sized DiGiornos, and several racks of Personal-sized pies from other manufacturers (Pepperidge Farms, Mama Celeste, etc.), but nothing reserved for the prized DiGiorno Personal. However what I've found is that, if you look long enough, you'll find two or three Personal-sized DiGiorno pizzas (typically one Cheese and either one Pepperoni and one Supreme or two Pepperoni or two Supreme) wedged in amongst the competitors, way in the back, as if they'd been briefly considered by a consumer but then rejected in favor of some other brand, the implication being that the DiGiorno Personal imprint sells quite well on the whole and the stock has been depleted to just these two or three units and there's a backorder on additional units and thus the dedicated DiGirono Personal rack has been removed until the next order arrives, with the remaining units left to fend for themselves.

Except that this is always the situation at ShopRite. Meaning that -- while the general rule of thumb is that while there doesn't seem to be a DiGiorno Personal anywhere in the Frozen Foods section, if you look long enough you'll discover one, two, or even three camoufloged behind the similarly packaged French Bread and Microwave-Ready frozen pizzas -- there's no guarantee you'll find anything at all. Like, for all you know the issue is that the distributor keeps slipping a trio of poorly selling DiGiorno Personals into ShopRite's shipment of full-sized DiGiornos in a vain attempt to get the store to pick up the item despite the fact that the Frozen Foods Manager keeps telling them that the damn things just don't sell. And maybe this is the time that the the manager finally said, "fuck this, I'm sending them back, I don't care how much it pisses them off," and there actually is no DiGiorno Personal anywhere in the store, you're just fishing through frozen goods on a fools quest. I mean, how long do you keep looking, when positive reinforcement has time and time again told you that you'll eventually find what you're looking for? Even if all external evidence is telling you that the search is futile?

The answer, as it turns out, is about ten minutes. And the message that I'm trying to convey to you through all of this is that I'm fucking hungry. And that when I'm in a pissy mood tomorrow because all I did all night was drink beer and not eat anything and now I have a headache, it's really not my fault.


(1) ShopRite being one of only two legit supermarkets I've encountered out here on the east coast (the other being A&P). ShopRite isn't unionized, and as such is an object lesson in why those of you who crossed picket lines durning the great SoCal supermarket employee strike of 2003 were making a catastrophic mistake for reasons that go far beyond throwing away the literal blood that was shed by previous generations in winning basic workers-rights provisions such as the 40 hour work week and the two-week annual vacation. Because the thing about non-unionized supermarket checkers is that they make minimum wage and, as such, straight don't give a fuck. As in, are conspicuously annoyed by the fact that they've been momentarily distracted from their conversation with the adjacent checker by having to read off the total cost of your purchase from the register. Not to mention that they're almost all black and (judging from their vernacular) poor, which adds whole other dimensions of cultural/racial/socio-economic guilt to the mix, plus if you're in the service industry like I am you can't help but a) sympathize, because believe me, at this point in my career I'm pissed off at you just for walking in the door and b) be incredibly pissed off because hey, I don't get to be an overt cock to my customers, so why the fuck do you?
Personally, I much prefer Vons.