Maybe it's because they're still rearranging the grocery store from the renovations that are still ongoing (I'm not finding the stuff any better now than I have been for the last couple of weeks; I still keep going to the 'old' aisles and discovering shoe polish where frozen food was). Or it might be a summer-time promotion, but I don't remember it from last summer and I've gone to this grocery store in the Norwichtown Mall for all the years we've lived in Norwich (from, I guess, when it was an ordinary store; i.e., before it was made into a 'super' store able to leap over tall newspaper reporters with glasses in a single bound).
The store has constructed a giant (let me try that again to better capture the actual size and give you a better sense of the proportion, GIANT. Much closer) display of Pepsi soda products as you enter it from the 'mall' side (in and of itself, a whimsical notion. The 'mall' has a Dress Barn (just me or in light of the exaggerated expectations about weight and size with which we saddle women, is this an odd choice for a store name?), a GNC, a Chinese restaurant, a nail and manicure place and a dollar store and more than twice as much empty floor space as occupied.) and my inner child practically wept for joy when I saw it.
When I was six, I thought there was nothing cooler than a tree house. As a matter of fact, until knee replacement surgery three summers ago made it too difficult to contemplate, I might still think that. But if you can't have a tree house, a fort is nearly as cool. We're talking a tall fort and a big one, too. I didn't know Pepsi made something called Brisk, or what it was until I googled it, and they also make something called Tropicana Twister soda that is so far from a day without sunshine that Anita Bryant would cry in frustration.
By using those brands and all the other sodas that Pepsi makes (I'm not sure anyone needs a cola with more caffeine and who-knows-what in it so you get spun up even faster, but the Pepsi folks make one, or more than one for all I know) and stacking the twelve-packs higher than I am tall (I'm five feet and nine inches tall) on three sides of a rectangle, the store has built a fort. I've been in the store three times since I noticed the fort on Saturday and all three times there have been guys, and only guys, in the display area.
Ladies, so you know-we could have gone to the soda aisle, assuming we could find it in the new store arrangement (it used to be near something called 'prepared food' which I think is a bit creepy; technically, for some species, we might be considered unprepared food and I don't find that notion comforting in the least), but as long as the soda fort is there, unless and until we men shoppers tear down the walls of this Jericho of Carbonation, us guys (we guys?) will buy ALL of our soda right here at the fort.
Pepsi underwrote a Michael Jackson tour. I mention that in case you thought about threatening to send Nana or Tick-Tock the Crock in for us as you near the check-out. Look what happened to MJ when he left Neverland. No amount of clapping will get us to budge from this spot and both Tiger Lily and Mr. Smee fully agree.
-bill kenny
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