Cookie Monster looks helplessly on, waiting for another load. Photo by María Helena Carey
….and it was horrible! Poop was imminent, eminent, and, frankly, emanating. And it was late and I started to kind of freak out because, really, who is a responsible parent and runs out of diapers?! (You cloth-diapering mothers get to stand back and pat yourselves in the back with a saintly and smug expression… until your washer breaks.)
But anyway, this is about me and the time I ran out of diapers and it was Sunday, just before 8 pm. So I walked two blocks, to my neighborhood convenience store, just before it closed, and got some. Until that tête-à-tête with the inevitability of poop and the lack of muslin and nursery pins in my house, I had completely taken for granted the Capitol Hill Super Market and other corner stores like it.
Corner stores have been a fixture of DC life ever since the times of Mary Z. Gray, who mentions corner stores in her memoir, “301 East Capitol.” The Corner Store Gallery at 900 South Carolina Avenue, SE, was a corner grocery store since 1870, according to their home history, which can be accessed online. Corner stores get blamed in the food desert problem– they are often overpriced and understocked, especially in areas like Wards 5, 7, and 8, where there is very little access to fresh food and produce. According to a recent Washington Post article, “Neighborhoods that are low-income with limited access to fresh food may have small convenience stores, but those cannot sustain a healthy community.”
While there are programs such as the Healthy Corner Store Program, which started last fall and which delivers healthy produce to the areas of the city that need it the most, the reality of a food desert still exists and it’s not pretty. Just to put it in perspective: you can get a 12 oz. box of Cheerios at Safeway or the Harris Teeter for about $3. That same box of Cheerios at Walmart is $2.98. At my corner store, it can sometimes cost you $6– or at least, that was the price last weekend, when I ran out of Diet Coke. This means that, on the day I checked, there was a 100% markup on a basic and relatively cheap staple, and I suspect that to be the case at other corner stores around the city.
(Aside: a box of Cheerios at Whole Foods can be $5. Caveat, posh emptor!)
However, the happiness of knowing that I can just run down the street in some barely-dignified apparel and get the item I need with a minimum of fuss and while helped by very nice folks is kind of worth the price hike. Part of the walkable, livable ethos of the city is knowing that I can flip-flop my way away from poop-related chaos without having to drive across the city to what I’m going to start calling Topsy-Turvy Target over in Columbia Heights. It’s also knowing that I’m saving $1-3 worth of gas that such an excursion would have incurred. And it’s knowing that, should I also get a hankering for fancy gummy worms or expensive tea, I can run less than a mile and go down to P&C and problem solved.
But I don’t think they carry diapers.