My favorite supermarket is called Hannaford’s.  I will only shop for groceries at their North Bennington Store, which just debuted a new program called “Hannaford’s On The Go.”

I knew this was coming; it’s the rage in grocery shopping. Our culture has a growing appetite for making people disappear and getting us to like it.

Their website and pamphlets proudly announced that in the future, I didn’t ever even have to leave my house or get out of the car to shop there. They assume I will be thrilled about it.

One of the customer service reps told me with great enthusiasm that I could go to their website – their motto is “Hannaford to go, You click. We Shop.” The site is for people who don’t have time to shop or are too infirm (or perhaps lazy) to shop.

Hannaford’s has experts in every department who will do the shopping; you click online on what you want, and when you come to the store, somebody brings the food right out to you in bags and puts them in your car.

The Wal-Mart down the road has special parking spaces for people who want to have their groceries brought out to them.

The rumor is that the Hannaford professional shoppers are instructed to pick the best produce for the shop n’go customers.

Hannaford’s is perhaps more important to me than I am to them.

But I doubt they know how important they have been to me. I am a sentimental fool, they are not just a store to me.

I’ve shopped there ever since I moved to the country, I know where everything is, where the bargains are, who the store manager is – hey, Tim Cahill – and the names of at least a dozen of the clerks.

I know what to buy in whatever order will fill up the cart appropriately. Their produce is fresh and good, the staff is almost always helpful (except for one grump who sometimes appears in the meat department.)

Wherever I live, I find the nearest Hannafords. My first store was in Saratoga Springs (this one had a sushi bar), my second in Greenwich, N.Y., my third in Queensbury, N.Y.,  this one in Vermont. I could shop in their stores with my eyes closed.

I love to shop alone and doodle through the aisles. Maria is an enormous pain in the ass when we shop together, so mostly, I ban her from Hannaford’s.

She rarely spends money, always thinks we don’t need food that we do need, she gets impatient after five minutes and second-guesses much of what I buy.  After fifteen minutes, when I am just beginning to relax, she is growling like a bear.

She suspects I like to flirt with the cashiers when she isn’t around. I tell her I’m too old to do that. She wouldn’t be interested in shop n’ go, shed rather starve in her studio making art than shop at all.

Left on her own, Maria would eat bread and cheese like some medieval monk doing penance. She needs nothing.

But when I shop and bring the food home, she purrs like a kitten and thanks me for shopping. Go figure. I don’t want her coming along unless we’re getting wine.

I take my time shopping, browsing the aisles, noting the music, the packaging,

I love to talk to the cashiers, I pride myself on getting even the surly kids to talk, my iPhone 11 is a huge conversation starter, and tonight, one of them showed me how he can shop now using his Apple Watch.

I eavesdrop on the conversations families are having, it fascinates me. And I learn a lot.

The cashiers are patient when I realize I forgot something I came for and let me rush back to the aisles to get it. They won’t let me buy any produce that is scratched or damaged, even if I say it doesn’t matter.

I know  Wal Mart’s and Amazon are big promoters of the pick-up grocery idea, another step in our world towards reducing the human contacts in our lives so corporations can think of ways to make more money doing things nobody really needs.

I am not into Old Fartism and have no use for nostalgia, but I am a strong advocate for human connection wherever possible.

I’d always prefer people, even if they are in customer support speaking Farsi.

I love the AI in my iPhone, but I don’t want to only speak with AI software for the rest of my life. I value my fleeting contact with cashiers and my time in the supermarket.

At Hannaford’s, I see real-life all around me, people and foods and trends, and ideas. I very often buy things I didn’t expect to buy or even know where there. I often saw this gay couple – two men –  shopping together, we talked sometimes, one day one of them came up to me with a big flower and hugged me and said they had just gotten married.

I chased after them in the parking lot to give them a bag of apples.

I notice the clothes shoppers are wearing, the way husbands and wives speak to one another, I’m interested in the food they buy.

This makes food shopping creative and exciting and often surprising.

Today, I got into big Alaskan King Crab legs and some fat and juicy lobster tails. I would never have bought them if Pablo had not told me how delicious they were and how he cooks them. We’re eating them tonight. (P.S. Maria loved them, but concedes she would never have bought them.)

I love seeing young mothers and fathers trying to handle restless two-year-olds, and once in a while I trade recipes with the mostly female shoppers I run into there. I love the little animal carts kids ride in as if they were at Disney World.

I care about what I cook; it isn’t an annoying habit I wish to rush through.

My young cashier and I had a buy-in to see which was faster closing a sale, my Iphone 11 or his Apple Watch, I creamed him. I told him I could grow my hair back in the time it took him to get his watch to the bong.

I’m close to the manager of the fish department (we trade recipes), and one of my favorite cashiers hails from New Jersey and has the tattoos and gold chains to prove it. He is a great cashier but would also make a great extra in the next Martin Scorcese movie.

It’s a good thing he’s friendly, I certainly wouldn’t want to argue with him.

I chat with Tim all the time, he hears about it if the grapes are sour, or the pineapples soft and rotten inside. When I complained about this once – I didn’t ask for a refund – he wouldn’t let me out of the store until I had agreed to take a new one home, free of charge.

I am an experienced shopper.

I start with cheese and hummus, work through the fruit and vegetable aisles, then stop at the fish department and work my way around the store – household goods, low-fat bison meat, and turkey dogs, toilet paper, soda, cream cheese, paper towels,  cat food and then the popcorn aisle.

When I get to the Canada Dry Diet Soda (with real ginger) I make sure there is room in the front of the card for the cases.

I have always done the grocery shopping and almost all of the cooking. This goes back to when my daughter Emma was born, and we lived in New Jersey. I am a feminized man, just as a friend told me the other day. My life was annoyed that I never went to the cheaper supermarket in town, then A & P. The produce sucked, I said.

I see myself more as a real man – I support the women in my life and love to feed and love them. Isn’t that what real men do?

In a sense, I owe my marriage to a Hannaford’s cashier. Way back when I first met Maria, and we were both divorced, I started buying her Asian Pears, they were expensive and a delicacy.

A cashier named Betty – I always went to her aisle when I saw her – saw the expensive pear and remarked that I didn’t usually buy them (this is what I love about the country), she wanted to know what was up?

I told her they were for my new girlfriend – how I loved saying that – and she leaned over and told me that this was a good thing to do. “Remember,” she said, “it’s the little things that matter. Don’t ever forget the little things; they show her that you care about her.”

This was essential advice and wise. Maria loved getting the Asian pears,  and to this day, I remember to give Maria the little things that show how much I love her. It does matter. Several women in line managed to listen in and supported Betty.

Every one of them said their husbands never remembered the little things; they thought I was cute.

I like talking to the cashiers and the store clerks. Just brief chatter really, I don’t hang around the register. But it’s a connection, still. It matters.

We do small chat about the weather, sometimes the news, about their problems with kids at home. In a sense, they are my friends. I’ll never be invited to their houses, and they’ll never come to mind, yet they are a part of the human experience in a disconnected world, they are part of the thread of human interactions that are what community is all about.

It’s the little things that make community too.

I don’t care about their politics, and they don’t ask about mine, but we are together a community, and our passing interactions with one another are part of the glue that makes humanity so special.

Shopping for food is not a numbing chore for me; it is about feeding and nurturing and caring for the people I love.

I asked one of the managers if he thought that one day there would only be Shop N’ Go and no people in the store to talk to at all. Sure, he said, it’s already here. They call it Amazon.

I asked the cashiers tonight what they thought of the new “Shop N’ Go” program, and they shrugged. I could tell they didn’t like it.

As I was leaving, I saw a woman pull up in her Subaru and a Hannaford worker rushing out with a cart full of food that she had ordered, and he went and chose for her.

He put the bags into the back of her car, and she waited to drive off.

“How do you like this service?” I asked.

“Oh, I love it,” she said. I saw two young children buckled up in the back, yelling to come in and buy some ice cream.

“I don’t even have to get out of the car, and I hate shopping, it’s such a boring chore.”

I didn’t respond, and she didn’t ask me what I thought. I guessed she got home and checked her e-mail right away.

She seemed in a rush and was happy to pull away in seconds. I almost spoke to her.

I checked myself. Was I just an older man clinging to what he knew, someone I don’t care to be? But I’m busy too, I work hard every day, I’m not retired, and I would hate to turn my shopping over to a stranger in a vest who did my shopping for me and picked my oranges.

I felt a bit blue, sorry for the kids who wouldn’t get to ride in the zebra cart behind their mother or father, and of a world where people no longer had much reason to speak to one another or bitch about the weather and were happy not to have to bother.

I guess I’m a freak. I would miss it.

I am not one to glorify the old days; they were never really better. But sometimes, I am grateful that I won’t be around long enough to have to live fully in the new days.

I don’t want to shop on the go. I can find the 20 minutes required to do it well.