For the first time in years, I am actually enjoying grocery shopping.

We have two supermarkets in the neighbourhood, both less than 10 minutes away by bike. One is a Sainsbury’s, and always has been, while the other one has had a more colourful history.

It started out as Safeway (red and green), and was initially a really good shop: wide range of goods, good quality vegetables, nice little inspiring ingredients.

Safeway then got bought by Morrison’s (black & yellow). Morrison’s aim is low prices, and that was very visible. Things got cheaper, but the choice narrowed. After a while there was 2 shelf metres of their own-label orange juice, and the top and bottom shelves were completely empty. I don’t know if that was intentional – they may have just been running the store while looking for a buyer – but I can’t imagine it went very well for them. We saw fewer and fewer people in the shop, and stopped going ourselves, too.

They finally sold the store to Waitrose (green) a couple of months ago. The change has been remarkable. There’s more choice, which is good, but even better is that their range is more focused on things I like! Instead of cheap fluffy white bread, they’ve got several kinds of whole grain bread; instead of many boxes of pale tomatoes they have organic vegetables. There’s a far wider choice of organic foods in general, and of vegetarian ready meals. The food in general is of better quality, and the deli department positively makes me drool. And the juice aisle has dozens of nice juices!

More generally, I now walk around in the store and feel good about the things I find. Rather than thinking, “Don’t they have anything GOOD here?” I can pick and choose. I find interesting things that weren’t on the list but would fit nicely into my dinner plan. Grocery shopping isn’t a painful chore any more.

It turns out that Waitrose is owned by the same group who run John Lewis department stores, which happens to be my favourite department store, by far. Those people either think just like me and have the same preferences – or maybe they just know very well what sort of customers they have and what those customers like. Either way, I really like this shop.